In the Small Medium Enterprise & Channel (SME&C) team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA), Security reporting to the Cloud Solution Architect Manager, you will enable SMC (Small, Medium, and Corporate) customers & Partners to achieve their business 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 customers (VOC)/partners 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 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.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) 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 customer-facing roles and success in leading in-depth technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Architects, IT Management, and Developers to drive value to our customers and is open to travel to customer site as needed by business.
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 (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 (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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Customer Satisfaction – Deliver positive Customer Satisfaction, and become trusted advisors to customers by leveraging solution area expertise to enable defined Customer Success Plan outcomes.
Qualifications
Technical Expertise:
At least 8+ years of experience working directly with customers in any of the following: providing technical readiness and training, delivery of support services, on-premises and remote technical support, solution development, account management, technical requirements gathering.At least 5 years of security related experience with any of the following security domain technologies:
Azure and Cloud Security Engineering
- Azure Security Infrastructure, Databases, Networking, Virtual Machines
- Azure Secrets and Keys
- Azure Identity
- Troubleshooting of data logging and audit, security monitoring
- Azure Governance and Compliance
- Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud
- Microsoft Sentinel
- Microsoft Client/Server Operating Systems Security, including related services (eg Certificate Authority, authentication/authorization mechanisms, encryption, health attestation)
- Microsoft Security recommendation experience (eg Securing Privileged Access, Credential Theft Mitigations)
- Azure Security Services (eg Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Azure Information Protection, Azure Security Center, Azure Log Analytics)
- Security Threat Landscape experience including advanced attack vectors and tools (eg Pass the Hash, Golden Ticket, ransomware)
Infrastructure Security experience with competitive cloud security technologies, cloud security platforms, or any of the following:
- Active Directory
- Azure Active Directory, Entra ID
- Cloud workload protection
- Threat protection
- WAF (Web Application Firewall)
- Stateful firewall. (NG Firewall)
- Data encryption and protection key services.
- SIEM, and Cloud Security Analytics
- Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)
- Security Operation Center
- Identity and Access Management
Microsoft 365 & Security
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Microsoft Purview: Data loss prevention (DLP), Information Protection, Insider Risk Management, Privileged Access Management, Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Compliance: Records Management, Audit / eDiscovery, Data Life Cycle Management
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Advanced Hunting
- Simulation Training
- Threat Analytics
- Investigations
Modern Management - Mobility and Security Solutions in any of the following:
- Microsoft Intune; Autopilot, Desktop Analytics, Conditional Access, identity governance, Azure Active Directory (AAD), Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS); Advanced Threat Analytics; Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Endpoint Management Security Related Technologies
- Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite + Security (EMS),
- Active Directory/Identity
- Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (D-ATP)
- Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
- Other endpoint security solutions and comprehensive threat protection technologies.
Experience Profile
- 12+ years of total IT experience, with minimum 5 years of experience in Infrastructure/Cloud Security related profile, experience in designing, delivering or managing information security services
Any of the below certifications
- Certification (Any one of the certifications – Minimum)
- SC-100 Cybersecurity Architect Certification
- SC-200 Security Operations Analyst Associate
- SC-300 Identity and Access Administrator Associate
- SC-400 Information Protection Administrator Associate
- SC-900 Security, Compliance, and Industry Fundamentals
- CISA, CISM, ITIL, CISSP, CISM, CCSK, CCSP, CCAK, CIRSC
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.
