Director Cloud Solution Architect - Azure

Microsoft

2d

About The Position

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.
The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.
Do you have a passion for growing a team of innovative, agile, and customer-obsessed Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs)? Support for Mission Critical is looking for a Director Cloud Solution Architect - Azure, an aspirational leader to set strategy, coach, and orchestrate a team of deep technical architects aligned to Software Development Companies (SDC) who are undergoing or anticipating hyper-growth on Azure. CSAs will have visibility across all areas of Microsoft to ensure customers achieve maximum value, not only from Azure, but across the entire Microsoft ecosystem (inc. security, M365, etc.). Target SDC customers require deep technical capabilities: resiliency, workload expansion, market leadership through co-innovation, strengthened reliability and security through operational excellence. You’ll help ensure the team is pushing customers to realize enhanced reliability, security, performance and capacity, correlating their requests or platform events into actionable recommendations, and emphasize rapid response, customer advocacy, and deep technical engagement.

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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ 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.
• 3+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, and/or technical architect managers.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 12+ 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 6+ years experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications) AND PMP or SRE certification.
• 5+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, and/or technical architect managers.
• Deep technical acumen: level-400 expertise in one Azure domain; broad familiarity with others.
• Knowledge of AI services and Microsoft ecosystem (Security, M365, Dynamics).
• Proven ability to manage complex, highly available services and triage customer escalations.
• Exceptional communication and relationship-building skills.
• Software development and AI expertise.
• Experience in DevOps, CI/CD.
• Experience launching products or support offers.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of driven and highly skilled CSAs who actively listen and empathize with customers to anticipate their needs, advocate for them within Microsoft, and measure success by customer satisfaction and operational excellence.
• Act as a technical leader to drive vision for the team and customers, pilot new models and data usage, scale successful practices and design patterns across the organization, and mentor others to grow their technical capabilities.
• Employ a reliability-first mindset, focused on proactively testing features, simulating failures, integrating chaos engineering, observability, and similar driving perpetual innovation.
• Build and strengthen bridges across Microsoft working seamlessly across teams and cultures, partnering closely with Microsoft Engineering, to communicate complex concepts in clear, actionable terms, fostering an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, establishing trusted technical relationships both with customer senior decision-makers (CTOs, product owners) as well as Microsoft stakeholders.
• Define account strategies for target customer portfolios, focused on enterprise scale customers anticipating or going through hyper-growth, aligning business priorities with Customer Success Organization, Sales, and Engineering KPIs.
• Maintain a culture of curiosity, diving beyond typical root-cause analysis to understand decision making and history of circumstances to drive continuous improvement; correlate customer requests or platform events to actionable recommendations with clear accountability by the customer and/or Microsoft.
• Measure success via resiliency targets, adoption metrics, escalation prevention, customer satisfaction, impact avoidance, business outcomes and operational excellence (reliability, security, performance, capacity), highlighting outcome-based results that positively differentiate the value of the team.
• Oversee staffing and resource planning, ensuring the right technical talent is hired to meet evolving customer needs.
• Manage operational targets and budget adherence.
• Guide professional development and readiness across the team, fostering continuous learning and growth.
• Promote an inclusive, collaborative work environment and communicate clear vision and priorities.
• Ensure compliance with governance standards and support contract renewals.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees