With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty.

In the Partner Success team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering Partner and Customer success. As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) reporting to the Cloud Solution Architect Manager you will enable Partner and customers to achieve their outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your leading technical team’s expertise, you will drive the team to ensure customers get value from their Microsoft investments.

In this role you will adapt business models, plans, and solutions to insights. Act as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner across communities to add and prioritize. Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Demonstrate and prove solutions capability and value. Apply broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet requirements and resolve identified constraints. Lead customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture. Identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers and route non-technical issues for removal. Adapt methodology and apply governance to minimize business and technical risks. Generate new ideas for changes and improvements. Develop and expand existing impactful relationships with stakeholders. Respectfully challenge customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalate appropriately. Identify Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to convince customers of solution. Share ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with internal teams using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape. Participate in external architect community events and share learnings with the internal team. Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer usage/Azure Consumed Revenue. The CSA drives delivery execution through preparedness, precision delivery, overall utilization, and high customer satisfaction in a cost-efficient manner.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

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.

Responsibilities

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect (CSA - Modern Work) to drive customer transformation in our Solutions. You will own the customer engagements, including architecture, implementation, and production.

The ideal candidate will have experience in Partner or customer-facing roles and success in leading in-depth technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Security Architects, Enterprise Architects, IT Management, and Developers to drive value to our customers.

Key responsibilities include:

• Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment (Insights about Customer/Partner and Industry): Gather customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and map architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Adapt business models, plans, and solutions to insights.

• Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment (Internal Advocacy): Act as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across communities to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Structured Approach): Leverage and champion an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs.

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Architecture Proposals): Receive and synthesize data about customer/partner business and technical requirements, address them with technical architecture(s), demonstrate and prove those solutions capability and business value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Requirements and Constraints): Apply broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Help to shape and enhance customers' requirements.

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Pre-Sales and/or Implementation Leadership): Lead customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s). Provide thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Resolving Blockers): Identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) to accelerate architecture implementations and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.

• Architecture Design and Deployment (Risk and Quality Management): Adapt methodology and apply governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g., Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Define customer/partner conditions of success, adhere to quality assurance, and calculate risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

• Practice Development: Generate new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners. Drive opportunities for IP re-use, best practice sharing, and consumption.

• Trusted Advisor (Relationship Building): Develop and expand existing impactful relationships with customer and partner/MCS architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers and business stakeholders.

• Trusted Advisor (Challenger Mindset): Respectfully challenge customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalate appropriately.

• Trusted Advisor (Competitor Insights/ Differentiated Value Proposition): Understand the competitor's architecture solutions and identify Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.

• Thought Leadership (Internal Education): Share ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape.

• Thought Leadership (External Presence): Participate in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and share learnings with the internal team. Act a mentor to junior colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts.

• Partner & Customer Usage: Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Drive efforts to ensure that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.

• Partner Satisfaction – Deliver positive Partner Satisfaction and become trusted advisors to customers by leveraging solution area expertise to enable defined Delivery/Success Plan outcomes.

Qualifications

Fluent in reading, writing and speaking Japanese as well as the ability to speak and understand English when giving instructions and directions, and when talking with colleagues, managers, and others for work matters.

Strong presentation skills

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Proven experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies.

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience in technical roles

• Strong interpersonal, presentation, and communications skills and the ability to work with customers at the C level

• Experience with managing critical and complex customer situations or incidents

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (or equivalent experience)

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• The ability to teach, tailor, and take control of the technical sales process to drive specific customer actions and disrupt conventional thinking.

• Knowledge of the cloud platform, productivity platform, identity, and multi-geography deployment strategy.

• The ability to explain and advise on cloud security considerations, capabilities, and tools across software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

• The ability to apply ingenuity, inventiveness, and imagination to the inclusive design and construction of a product, service, program, or initiative.

• The ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. This includes the ability to define, diagnose, and determine an appropriate resolution, recommendation, or decision while considering alternatives and factors (e.g., resources, costs, tradeoffs).

• The ability to adapt one's behavior to different people and situations, while recognizing, acknowledging, and understanding different perspectives.

• The ability to lead customer conversations on competitive cloud differentiation in compelling customer terms. This includes the ability to lead the analysis, planning, and execution of cloud migration to drive successful transitions to the cloud.

• The ability to build and maintain a professional network internally and with individuals outside the organization to share information, promote collaboration, and optimize individual and organizational effectiveness.

• The ability to make a verbal message understood and to receive/understand messages during in-person or remote (e.g., telephone) interactions.

• The ability to identify problems and review related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.

• Knowledge of and the ability to carry out the process of planning, organizing, and managing tasks and resources to accomplish a well-defined objective. This includes the ability to manage and provide project deliverables, optimize the contribution of the people involved, and assess the impact of project decisions on quality, productivity, schedules, cost, performance, etc.

• The ability to develop and maintain positive working relationships with supervisors, staff, managers, customers, and vendors. This includes expressing empathy and compassion when dealing with the needs and problems of others, being approachable, taking time to address the concerns of coworkers, and treating others with respect and dignity.

• The ability to manage project stakeholders and stakeholder engagements. This includes identifying stakeholders, prioritizing their concerns, managing expectations, and planning and monitoring stakeholder engagements.

• The ability to prepare clear, accurate, and understandable written text, and follow the basic rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This may include the ability to create and receive/understand memos, emails, proposals, reports, and professional or general correspondence. This may also include the ability to comprehend, communicate, and deliver technical information to audience in a manner that is adapted to their needs, levels of understanding, and backgrounds.

Deep technical expertise in couple of the Modern work suite of Product lines such as, Security & Compliance, Information Protection, Purview, InTune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Microsoft 365 E3/E5 features, M365 Security is required.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .