Cloud Solution Architect Director

Job Responsibility: With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products, services, and partnerships. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more. In the Customer Success team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Cloud Solution Architect Director, you will run a team who enable customers to achieve their outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your leading technical team's expertise, you will drive the team to ensure customers get value from their MS investments. Microsoft aspires to help our customers architect and deploy first class cloud infrastructure solutions in Azure by applying scalable best practices in the cloud with Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF). Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative, and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is hiring professionals that will drive customer cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% / up to 100% from home. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual's capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Customer Centricity

• Provides support and guidance for their team anticipating trends (e.g., industry, technology) and gathering customer/partner technical insights to develop strategy and execution plans that account for changing landscapes and key priorities. Leverages customer insights to influence key customer relationships. Influences others to focus and adapt architectural models, plans, and solutions to align with key insights and drive consultative approach with customers/partners. Represents the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner through escalation across broader teams and with customers, with emphasis on feedback/insights and removing blockers to accelerate value. Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) and mentors peers on best practices around internal resource usage. Drives and ensures team alignment with Microsoft-centric operations and cadences. Leverages team insights and broad patterns of feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights that influence product roadmaps and business decision making. Drives customer/partner advocacy and sharing success stories and learnings with the wider internal team. Connects and communicates economic, business, and technology trends shaping relevant industries.
• Supports team in developing and expanding existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders for large and high-impact customers/partners. Provides coaching on how to build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Drives team to facilitate effective customer/partner conversations and demonstrate and prove the capability and value of solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Provides real-time coaching in live customer scenarios to improve team performance and gather insights across customer interactions. Understands how the team's work aligns with customer success plan and drives the team to proactively anticipate and deliver customer outcomes by developing strategic partnerships with internal teams. Builds a strong relationship with peers globally by actively participating in account planning, consumption and support planning, and resource planning. Ensures employees are equipped with the capabilities and means to support customer skilling and provide technical domain expertise in technical delivery scenarios with other internal and external stakeholders to influence customer readiness. Seeks out opportunities to contribute to One Microsoft strategies, role modelling collaboration and accountability.
• Drives team to provide thought leadership in identifying trends and proactively proposing solutions that drive transformative delivery across customers/partners. Drives a seamless and connected customer experience. Proactively shares best practices so others can leverage and scale. Leads team(s) to clearly define customer/partner conditions of success. Drives customer health within the territory and accelerates unified support contract coverage where applicable. Anticipates customer unmet needs and dissatisfaction and oversees the creation and execution of strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation. Orchestrates and oversees transformative delivery across strategic/high potential customers/partners and proactively shares these best practices so others can leverage and scale. Champions the creation of strategies that improve customer/partner experience.
• Actively listens and acts as a catalyst to create and sustain constructive tension and trust with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders by respectfully looking into their decisions and/or areas where they might do more. Builds on network and industry experience to connect customers/partners with ideas, people, and resources to support their success. Drives team to execute customer/partner engagements leveraging the challenger mindset.

Business Impact

• Drives adherence to Microsoft standards and recommended practices by setting expectations for the team around methodology and governance to ensure that the team identifies, communicates, and minimizes business and technical risks. Ensures governance of technical work, including robust architectures that are validated and delivered in line with best practices. Ensures that teams leverage standard tools to maintain accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Drives the team to apply business and technical capabilities and integrate insights across complex customers/partners to resolve blockers and proactively create workaround strategies to circumvent complex or escalated technical blockers and unmet customer needs through regular reviews and check-ins to drive customer acceleration. Identifies widespread or global patterns in blockers and develops strategies to resolve and prevent them in the future. Coaches team on best practices for handling escalations. May provide insight to de-escalate risks in customer compete scenarios.
• Manages the business (e.g., scorecards, forecasting) by delivering against team targets, achieving business metrics, and ensuring the team delivers on Microsoft's Customer Promise. Holds teams accountable for proactively using expert knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and for influencing the shape of new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners and markets while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Coaches across team(s) to lead solution design, resilience reviews, and technical optimization that results in production deployment application and that increases customer/partner usage, consumption, target metrics, and overall Microsoft health. Optimizes to drive customer/partner usage across technology areas and business areas. Creates opportunities and coaches the team to drive complex engagements (e.g., regional, worldwide initiatives, cross-cloud) to expand or accelerate cloud consumption and leads these customer/partner conversations. Works across teams and organizational boundaries to seek out and leverage Microsoft insights that strengthen and fuel new commercial growth and consumption. Influences senior and complex partners to grow or scale the business with strategic/high-potential opportunities.
• Drives awareness across all levels of the organization of customer/partner challenges, industry trends, and competitor architectures to allow team members to engage with customers/partners, demonstrate Microsoft's value, and develop counter strategy. Holds team accountable for leading the adoption of Microsoft technologies.

Technical Leadership

• Fosters a continuous technical self-learning culture and community sharing of stories by encouraging and empowering the team to share learnings, and by establishing a cadence (e.g., internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact across teams. Engages as a technical advisor and business advocate toward the improvement of the solution area. Provides thought leadership by sharing deep business insight and driving critical decisions that impact Microsoft and the industry. Leverages market insights to partner with leadership in defining global vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive internal development and targeted and market-relevant up-skilling across teams. Influences community to drive technical readiness. Acts as a mentor to colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Proactively partners with the country/subsidiary learning lead to resolve issues and blockers and drive learning across teams.
• Models how to engage constructively and transparently with the technical and/or business community locally and globally. Participates in management communities (e.g., manager excellence community) to evolve adaptive engines of change, foster a culture of fast and effective learning at all levels, and support and provide management best practices to peers. Leads the direction that internal team members and stakeholders take with customers/partners by facilitating the dissemination of ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across boundaries, and actively pursues opportunities that grow impact and capabilities of the broader organization. Drives collaboration across teams (e.g., account teams, product teams) and solution area communities. Drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through technical and business presentations and engagements with internal and external audiences, and by driving programmatic execution and scale motions.
• Accelerates innovation by coaching teams on building and/or modifying intellectual properties (IPs) rooted in domain expertise and/or industry acumen. Anticipates and addresses organization- and industry-wide gaps, patterns, and needs, and drives changes and improvements to existing IP, technologies, and/or processes to scale across global customer/partner businesses and markets while driving opportunities for IP reuse and best practice sharing through others. Leads the development and modifications to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Drives strategy for new IP and partners with managed intellectual property (MIP), Design, and Governance to improve IP.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 10+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 15+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
• OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 8+ years experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
• 8+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.

Cloud Solution Architecture M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across Canada is CAD $156,000 - CAD $309,500 per year. Find additional pay information here: Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.