Microsoft Fabric IQ Architect

Role Overview

The Fabric IQ Architect is responsible for the designing, planning, implementation, and ongoing evolution of the Fabric IQ" platform / solution. This role sits at the intersection of strategy, architecture, engineering, and operations — guiding the technical vision of the fabric, ensuring scalability, reliability, performance, security, and alignment with business goals.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop the high-level and detailed architecture for the Fabric IQ system (control planes, data planes, orchestration, APIs, modules)
• Define architecture roadmaps, migration strategies, and versioning for evolving the fabric over time
• Evaluate, select, and integrate underlying infrastructure and technology components (switches, controllers, orchestration tools, monitoring, metadata, etc.)
• Oversee the implementation of new features or modules, ensuring they align with architectural principles and best practices
• Ensure scalability, high availability, failover, and disaster recovery of the Fabric IQ platform
• Establish standards, guidelines, patterns, and governance around code, APIs, modules, and infrastructure
• Collaborate with product management, business stakeholders, and customers to transform requirements into robust, maintainable architecture
• Lead proofofconcepts (PoCs), pilot deployments, and technical evaluations of new approaches
• Perform architecture reviews, audits, performance tuning, capacity planning, and root-cause analysis of issues
• Mentor and guide teams (developers, engineers, SREs) in architecturally aligned implementation
• Ensure security, compliance, and resilience are designed into the system from the start
• Stay current with industry trends, emerging tech, and competitor solutions; drive innovation inside the fabric domain

Required Skills & Experience

Technical & Domain

• Deep understanding of fabric architectures (for networking or data, depending on domain)
• Strong knowledge of control plane / data plane separation, orchestration, and routing/switching (or equivalent in data fabrics: metadata, pipelines, lakehouses)
• Experience with SDN, network automation, APIs, microservices, orchestration frameworks, or (in data domain) ETL pipelines, data models, query engines
• Experience designing for high availability, fault tolerance, and distributed systems
• Proficiency in performance optimization, capacity planning, and measuring KPIs
• Strong familiarity with security in distributed systems (authentication, authorization, encryption, isolation)
• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring and observability
• Ability to write architectural artifacts: diagrams, decision logs, interface specs, SRS, etc.

Experience & Leadership

• 8+ to 12+ years of experience in system architecture / solution architecture roles
• Proven track record of leading complex projects end-to-end
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and influence engineering teams
• Excellent communication skills to liaise across technical and non-technical stakeholders

Desirable / Bonus

• Certifications relevant to the domain (e.g. Extreme Fabric, cloud certifications, networking, data engineering)
• Experience with product development life cycle and SaaS deployment models
• Experience with migration from legacy architectures to fabric-based approach
• Knowledge of domain-specific protocols or frameworks (e.g. if networking, VXLAN, BGP, OSPF, etc.; if data, Microsoft Fabric, Spark, Lakehouse)
• Experience with cost optimization, multi-tenant environments, usage metrics
• Research / innovation background (contributing to standards, open source, etc.)