Digital Cloud Solution Architect

At Small Medium Enterprises and Channel (SME&C), we are leading a fast-growing, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered global sales team—one that is deeply driven by customer success. By uniting our Small Medium Business, Corporate, Strategy, and Partner teams, we are unlocking the largest customer opportunity, backed by the industry's most significant investments. Leveraging the power of AI and our extensive partner ecosystem,we are redefining how businesses of all sizes adopt technology to drive growth and innovation.
SME&C is more than a sales organization—it's a culture of innovation, opportunity, and inclusivity. Here, you'll be part of a diverse, performance-focused, and customer-obsessed team where collaboration, connection, and continuous learning fuel everything we do. If you thrive in a fast-paced, digital-first environment and are eager to make a meaningful impact, explore how SME&C can be the next step in your career. Together, we are shaping the future of business.
This role is part of Global SMB segment, working primarily with digital natives, enterprises, and small businesses that maintain a direct relationship with Microsoft. Success is measured by net-new revenue contribution; workload adoption and expansion across the assigned portfolio.

Sales Customer Engagements

• Proactively engages with and reaches out to customer technical decision makers
and influencers proactively and independently. Utilizes information on customer
business, industry, needs, competitive landscape and key priorities to support
customer's digital transformation, challenge them when necessary, and position
the customer to deliver architectures. Keeps up to date with customer
information, industry and market trends, and compliance regulations.

• Uses knowledge of customer context, cross-solution or portfolio expertise, and
deep technical and market/industry knowledge to build credibility with customers
individually or at scale.

• Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading
technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g.,
role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams, leveraging knowledge of
processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider, co-sell Partners), tools, and programs
(e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds).Searches for customer
references to use in engagements.

• Leverages knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center,
demo sites, virtual sites) with limited managerial support and proactively engages
product and support teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate blockers by
conveying impact.

• Understands team resources and supports efforts to maximize the impact of
customer engagements through capacity planning, prioritization, capabilities
assessment, and utilization of resources. Receives instructions to prioritize
resources and works to maximize selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and
subsidiary strategy as directed.
Scale & Collaboration

• Captures core competitive knowledge across solution areas and delivers back to
product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop
compete strategies.

• Applies and customizes existing demonstration assets. Demonstrates and
oversees demonstrations (e.g., Architectural Design Sessions, Proof of Concept
sessions) of solutions based on multiple Microsoft products through initial
engagements.

• Monitors and analyzes action plans to promote customer usage of key/prioritized
Microsoft solutions/products that support customer's business outcomes.
Identifies opportunities to promote usage.

• Applies the orchestration model to proactively drive deal closure by identifying
and aligning internal stakeholders and leveraging and expanding relationships
with partners.
Architecture Design and Deployment

• Receives and synthesizes data about customer/partner business and technical
requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates
and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design
collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.

• Drives pilots, proof of concept (POC), and value (e.g., optimizing solutions and
costs) for multiple technical solutions across technology areas to prove the
proposed architecture design. Moves the customer forward from pilots to
productive deployments by rooting pilots in business impact. Appropriately
leverages growth levers (e.g., Azure Credit Offer [ACO]) to ensure successful
adoption of POCs.

• Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s).
Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and
deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or
implementation.

• Identifies, escalates, and works to resolve technical blockers (e.g., changing
configurations, sample coding) to accelerate architecture implementations, and
routes non-technical issues for removal by appropriate party.

• Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and/or
minimize business and/or technical risks, defines customer/partner conditions of
success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks whilst designing and/or
delivering solutions.
Driving Customer Success

• Builds customer timelines to identify and gain buy in on metrics in conjunction
with partners to align with customer's digital transformation initiative and expand
customer success coverage as a discipline. Establishes cadence for checking in
and reporting on people, process and technology progress.

• Acts as the Voice of the Customer by driving new feedback, blockers, insights,
resource (e.g., OneList, End Customer Investment Funds) items across territories
so they can be added and prioritized. Represents the customer to product teams
to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory.

• Identifies gaps and drives new workloads through communication of financial
value to the customer, collaborating with sales team and driving new workloads.
Builds on her or his network and industry experience to connect customers with
ideas, people, and resources to new support customer opportunities. Cultivates
the strategic image of Microsoft as a valued business partner that serves a wide
range of customers/partners by aligning the vision for Microsoft cloud
technologies with future industry needs. Creates a vision with business solution
scenarios and partners/services that helps the customer meet their business goals
and achieve their long-term corporate vision. Enables partners to a certain extent
on projects to be a part of the client-side team.

• Drives new workloads jointly with sales team by leading demand generation and
actively identifying new engagements. Holds peer teams accountable, and brings
insights to drive success of Microsoft cloud solutions by taking ownership of
milestones within engagements. Drives One Microsoft mindset.
Technical Leadership

• Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows
domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers,
partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.

• Shares ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with team members using
knowledge of Microsoft cloud solutions and their context in the competitive
landscape. Provides thought leadership by acting as role model for the architect
community and consistently sharing knowledge to increase the functional or
technical skills and expertise of peers in ways that impact career goals and
business outcomes.

• Monitors and responds to internal and external tech community posts, attends
community calls, sessions, hackathon, etc., and acts as a mentor for their
technology area. Contributes and participates in Customer Executive Briefing
Center sessions. Shares best practices internally on community calls and drives
recognition of Microsoft Cloud solutions through presentations and
engagements with external audiences.

• Conducts group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, webinars) to
present and educate customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits
across Microsoft solutions/products. Ensures customer cloud platform
enablement by gaining buy in at the C-level for cloud platform readiness and
orchestrating various resources within Microsoft, partner, and customer resources
to get them on board with Microsoft's cloud platform environment readiness
initiative.
Other

• Embody our culture and values

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales

• 5+ years experience with cloud-based solution designs, migrations and
management of technology.

• 3+ years of experience in pre-sales and in a direct quota carrying role.

OR Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND
8+ years experience in technical architect, technical consulting, design and
implementation, and/or technical sales in a quota carrying role.

OR equivalent extertise and experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years experience in technical architect, consulting, design and implementation, and/or sales
o OR equivalent experience.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.