Digital Native Senior/Principal Solution Engineer - Cloud & AI

Microsoft • San Francisco, CA

3d

About The Position

In this technical sales role, you'll help Digital Native and ISV customers design secure, scalable, and resilient cloud architectures that power their products and accelerate their growth. Using Azure's IaaS and PaaS services, you'll guide fast-moving organizations through migration, modernization, optimization, and innovation—translating technical capabilities into business outcomes and competitive advantage. You'll collaborate across teams to deliver solutions that enhance agility, reduce costs, and unlock value through AI-powered infrastructure. We are hiring both Senior and Principal Solution Engineers to work directly with technical founders, engineering leaders, and business stakeholders to architect platforms that support AI workloads and business-critical applications at scale. You'll bring deep expertise in migrating and optimizing core workloads—including Kubernetes Services, Windows/Linux, API Management on Azure, with particular attention to the elasticity, cost efficiency, and time-to-market demands that define Digital Native and ISV businesses. Beyond migration, you'll lead customers through modernization using the 6R framework, containerization best practices, and Azure-native services like AKS and Arc, while exploring how AI and intelligent agents can accelerate legacy transformation and product development. You'll apply strong networking expertise to design hybrid and cloud-native solutions—virtual networks, VPNs, and secure routing architectures—that meet performance, multi-tenancy, and compliance needs. You'll complement this with trusted partner solutions available on Azure to ensure a secure, optimized, and scalable experience. You'll have the opportunity to grow your technical expertise through Microsoft's learning resources, including support for industry-recognized certifications across Azure infrastructure, security, and AI. With a solid grasp of Azure security services and compliance frameworks, you'll help customers meet regulatory requirements and build cloud environments ready for the future. 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

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.
• Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• 6+ years of technical pre-sales, technical consulting, technology delivery, or related experience.
• Proven experience in cloud infrastructure, including migration of workloads such as Windows, SQL, Linux, and PostgreSQL.
• Experience designing or selling solutions involving hybrid networking, secure connectivity, or network performance optimization in enterprise environments.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), App Platform, and containerization strategies.
• Understanding Cloud Services such as Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud services, including security, compliance, and hybrid cloud scenarios.
• Competitive Landscape: Awareness of key AI platforms beyond Azure (AWS, GCP) and the AI open-source ecosystem.
• Ability to engage technical and business stakeholders to design and deploy scalable, secure cloud solutions.
• Enterprise-Grade Architecture: Ability to create and explain 3-tier, system context, and system interaction diagrams, with proven experience building AI-focused solutions on the cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) from MVP to production.
• Breadth across foundational security, foundational AI, and architecture design, with depth in one or more of the following: Azure AI Expertise: Deep, hands-on expertise in one or more Azure AI areas—Cognitive Services, Azure OpenAI, AI Agents, Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Search/vector indexes, Azure Document Intelligence, Azure Content Understanding, or equivalent OCR technology.
• Programming & Integration: Proficiency with Python, C#, R, JavaScript, or similar languages in application development, and the ability to integrate Azure AI with services like Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Docker, API Management, and MCP servers.
• Infrastructure as Code: Strong understanding of Bicep, Terraform, or ARM and experience deploying IaC templates in secure environments.
• Core AI & ML Concepts: Familiarity with prompt engineering, RAG, agentic orchestration, and tools such as Jupyter notebooks and VS Code.
• GenAIOps & DevOps: Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps), prompt and model evaluation, AI harnesses, and observability via Application Insights, Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
• Agentic Workflows: Familiarity with Agent Framework, MCP, LangChain, or other agentic frameworks, including configuring tools for dynamic LLM execution.
• Generative & Responsible AI: Knowledge of current and emerging GenAI technology and foundational models, plus Responsible AI practices including ethical considerations, bias mitigation, and fairness.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical sales through demos, proofs of concept, and architecture accelerators to influence solution design and enable production deployments.
• Help customers validate technical assumptions by writing working code and prototyping MVPs.
• Lead architecture sessions and technical workshops with technical decision makers and founders to accelerate Azure adoption.
• Build trusted relationships with platform and engineering leads to co-design secure, scalable, multi-tenant solutions.
• Resolve technical blockers by collaborating with engineering and channeling customer insights back into the product.
• Maintain deep, current expertise in AI-assisted dev tools, CI/CD, DevOps, and cloud-native development (APIs, containers, microservices), cloud migration, resiliency, security, and compliance.
• Represent Microsoft in customer forums and technical communities through thought leadership.
• Embody our culture and values.
• Develop opportunities that deepen customer success and help Digital Native and ISV customers extract maximum value from their Azure investments as they scale.
• Understand consumption metrics and what they signal about program effectiveness, and collaborate with local teams on nominations and intake support.
• Apply subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers, following best practices and reusing repeatable IP.
• Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the engineering teams to address key blockers, and influence roadmap and feature prioritization.
• Debug technical issues and provide fixes for engagements that hit roadblocks.
• Stay current on market trends, engage the AI technical community, and educate customers on the Microsoft's Cloud and AI platform.
• Partner with field teams to share expertise, drive Factory pipeline, and accelerate customer success—collating execution feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Support for industry-recognized certifications across Azure infrastructure, security, and AI.
• Microsoft's mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
• Growth mindset, innovation to empower others, and collaboration to realize shared goals.
• Culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior