OverviewWe are seeking a highly experienced Sr. Cloud Solution Architect to join our Federal organization. This role requires deep technical expertise across Azure workloads, including AI, data, applications, and infrastructure, and a passion for helping enterprise customers solve complex challenges and accelerate their digital transformation.
In this senior, customer-facing role, you will lead strategic technical engagements and serve as a trusted advisor to both technical and executive stakeholders. The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of deep technical competency, the ability to technically program manage complex, multi-workstream initiatives, and the executive presence required to communicate effectively with senior leaders and decision-makers.
You will ensure end cloud solutions are deployed effectively, partner with Customer Success leaders and account teams to shape and execute cloud strategies, and drive projects from strategy through implementation and operationalization. This role requires the ability to orchestrate across multiple technical teams, align architecture to business outcomes, and translate complex technical concepts into clear executive-level messaging.
This is a unique opportunity to operate at the intersection of strategy and execution-helping government customers modernize mission-critical systems, adopt AI responsibly, and build secure, scalable cloud platforms that enable long-term innovation and mission impact.
ResponsibilitiesBusiness Impact
Operates in accordance with required operational excellence and proven practice standards across all sales stages, activities, and tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Collaborates across Microsoft and customer/partner teams to deliver on strategy and achieve customer and partner objectives while increasing overall satisfaction. Proactively manages business and technical risks, adapts methodology, and applies governance principles to identify, communicate, and mitigate risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Continuously prioritizes among competing demands, focusing on where the greatest customer impact can be achieved while ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
Proactively identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage, and Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale, based on customer and partner business value and a clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition across supported platforms. Helps empower cloud success, strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Actively listens to and respectfully challenges customers and partners, building trust and credibility while advocating for alternative architectures, solutions, and approaches that shape and enhance customer requirements and experiences. Identifies and evaluates industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals and the information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer and partner insights (e.g., technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer and partner business outcomes. Proactively captures opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, and works collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.
Proactively identifies, escalates, and mitigates blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization, and usage/consumption. Applies business, technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge to architecture and support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.
Customer Centricity
Proactively acts as the voice of the customer and partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories, and strategic and technical input with Engineering, Product, and internal communities by leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. Identifies patterns in feedback across customers, partners, territories, and industries, and uses those insights to develop strategic, actionable recommendations. Presents business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision-making, and bug fix prioritization, and owns and drives initiatives as appropriate.
Identifies and translates customer and partner challenges into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft's product and platform strategy, and articulates how these solutions meet customer outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals relative to competitive offerings. Proactively supports customer and partner adoption of Microsoft platform solutions across solution areas. Builds relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs) and helps bridge communication between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Independently engages with customer and partner executives, including Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and other C-level leaders, to align on security, compliance, operational, and risk requirements, engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper technical expertise is required.
Drives personal accountability and guides team members to focus on customer and partner experience through efficient delivery and a seamless, connected engagement experience. Defines customer and partner conditions for success by leveraging an understanding of customer goals. Anticipates and addresses customer and partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and executes strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of digital transformation.
Partner Specialization
Identifies and prioritizes opportunities aligned with revenue goals and orchestrates the growth of the solution utilization pipeline with partners. Provides support to partner and sales teams by bringing clarity to opportunities through proof-of-concept development and technical pre-sales engagement.
Understands solution area-specific market opportunities (e.g., competitor insights) and collaborates with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) stakeholders to lead and execute initiatives that translate opportunities into actionable plans. Proactively guides and supports partners in developing repeatable offerings, practices, products, and solutions, and advises partners through initial strategic customer implementations.
Technical Leadership
Leverages market insights and demand signals to assist leadership in identifying areas where upskilling and accreditations are needed based on customer demand. Demonstrates technical readiness through both depth aligned to solution area priorities and breadth aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU) and corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influences others to build their own technical readiness. Acts as a mentor by leading readiness and upskilling activities across the team and organization, educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices.
Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to relevant team members and stakeholders, and connects patterns across business and technology areas to drive improvements to products, intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes that enable solutions to scale across customers. Contributes to the development and refinement of Microsoft frameworks and methodologies and provides thought leadership and innovation to customers, partners, and internal communities.
Contributes to and helps lead virtual teams (v-teams) focused on technologies and customer or partner challenges, sharing ideas, insights, and strategic technical input across internal communities and broader Microsoft teams. Demonstrates strong industry knowledge and helps increase recognition of Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with internal and external audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite). Contributes to the development of intellectual property and identifies opportunities where new IP is needed (e.g., Copilot and AI scenarios) to build scalable and repeatable solutions. Participates in external technical and industry community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams.
Core Responsibilities:
- Ensure successful project delivery by providing technical leadership and orchestration across engagements, driving high-quality execution, removing blockers, and ensuring projects are delivered on time and aligned to customer objectives.
- Build trusted relationships with IT executives and business leaders to shape their Cloud and AI strategy, acting as a technical advisor and champion for customer success.
- Lead and coordinate across Microsoft, partner, and customer technical teams to manage dependencies, technical risks, and delivery milestones across complex engagements.
- Lead architectural design sessions and guide the implementation of secure, scalable, and resilient solutions using Microsoft best practices and frameworks such as CAF and WAF.
- Align technical delivery to customer success plans and consumption priorities, ensuring solutions deliver measurable business value and long-term platform adoption.
- Collaborate with internal teams and partners to design impactful delivery proposals and support execution.
- Translate complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes and executive-level messaging for senior stakeholders.
- Contribute to Microsoft's technical community by mentoring peers, sharing insights, and serving as a spokesperson in internal and external forums.
- Inspire customer innovation by helping customers adopt AI at scale and guiding them through their transformation journey.
- Demonstrate a growth mindset by continuously developing technical and professional skills and contributing to a culture of learning and excellence.
- Skills: Air gapped cloud, DevOps and DevSecOps, operations management, Azure virtual enclaves, ability to get (2) Azure/Data &AI certifications within 60d of hire - AZ-305, DP-100, AI-102, GH-300, AZ-700, CKA
- Embody our culture and values
QualificationsRequired/minimum qualificationsBachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 4+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
