Microsoft 365 Architect
About The Position
The Microsoft 365 Architect owns end-to-end design authority for the customer's Microsoft 365 estate across collaboration, messaging, content services, compliance, and low-code automation. The role is accountable for architecture decisions, design documentation, standards, and governance, and leads L3 escalations that require design-level intervention. This is a client-facing role that works onsite with customer IT leadership, security, and infrastructure teams and leads an offshore L3 engineering pod. The position covers architecture and design for Exchange Online and hybrid Exchange, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Power Platform, and Microsoft Purview. It also encompasses messaging and mail flow, content services and migrations, compliance controls, Power Platform governance, and operational L3 escalation and governance. The role is based at a client location in Houston, Texas, with business hours aligned to CST and on-call participation for P1/P2 incidents and change windows. It is described as a long-term contract role.
Requirements
- 12 years of experience in IT infrastructure.
- 6 years of experience in Microsoft 365 architecture and migrations.
- Mandatory skill: Microsoft 365 suite of products.
- Business-hours availability aligned to CST and on-call participation for P1/P2 incidents and change windows.
Responsibilities
- Own the target-state architecture for Exchange Online and on-premises hybrid services, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, file collaboration integration, Power Platform, and Purview.
- Produce and maintain HLD/LLD documentation, design decision records, as-built documentation, standards, and reference patterns; secure approval from the client architecture review board.
- Define tenant configuration baselines, governance guardrails, and lifecycle policies for sites, teams, groups, guests, and external sharing.
- Assess and remediate technical debt, including legacy Exchange servers, public folders, unsupported clients, orphaned sites, and oversized OneDrive estates.
- Conduct design reviews and sign off on high-risk or architecturally significant changes.
- Design and govern hybrid Exchange topology, mail routing, connectors, Autodiscover, free/busy, and cross-forest coexistence.
- Own mail hygiene and transport architecture, including Exchange Online Protection and Defender for Office 365 policies, antispam and antiphishing controls, transport rules, and journaling.
- Design and govern SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and enforcement across sending domains, including third-party senders.
- Own application relay mail architecture, including SendGrid domain authentication, dedicated IPs, subuser and API key models, suppression lists, deliverability and bounce management, IP warmup, and reputation monitoring.
- Own enterprise email signature and disclaimer management, including Exclaimer templates, AD attribute mapping, campaign banners, department- and region-based rules, and integration with Exchange Online transport or client-side deployment.
- Define mailbox provisioning standards, shared and resource mailbox models, retention and archiving, and migration from legacy archive platforms.
- Architect SharePoint Online information architecture, including hub site topology, navigation, metadata, search, content types, and term store.
- Design file-share and legacy on-premises SharePoint migration strategy and tooling, including sizing, throttling, cutover, and validation.
- Define OneDrive Known Folder Move, sync client policy, storage quotas, retention for leaver accounts, and offboarding data handling.
- Define permissions models, sharing controls, sensitivity-label-driven site protection, and access-review processes.
- Design and implement Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, auto-labeling, and DLP policies across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and endpoints.
- Design retention labels and policies, records management, litigation hold, and eDiscovery Premium workflows with Legal and HR.
- Implement Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and Audit Premium where in scope, and define triage and escalation into the service desk.
- Map regulatory and customer security framework control requirements to Purview configuration and evidence artifacts.
- Define Power Platform governance, environment strategy, DLP connector policies, Managed Environments, CoE Starter Kit adoption, licensing, and capacity management.
- Provide design guidance and code/solution reviews for Power Apps, Power Automate flows, and Dataverse usage; establish ALM using solutions and pipelines.
- Identify and shepherd automation opportunities that reduce service desk and operational ticket volume.
- Act as the final technical escalation point for M365 P1/P2 incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and drive permanent fixes through problem management.
- Chair M365 CAB input, review and approve RFCs, define rollback plans, and validate blast radius.
- Own Message Center and roadmap change activities.
- Partner with customer IT leadership, security, and infrastructure teams, and lead the offshore L3 engineering pod.
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
