Cloud Solution Architect

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.

We are looking for a **Cloud Solution Architect (CSA)**, specializing in **Security** who is passionate about driving our customers’ security & AI transformation on Microsoft platform. This is a **customer-facing technical delivery role**, owning the technical relationship between the customer and Microsoft, helping customers to leverage their Microsoft investments through architecture, implementation, and operational health engagements.

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**:

- Customer Centricity
- Identifies and evaluates security trends, gathers customer insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer’s business outcomes.
- Acts as the voice of the customer by driving new feedback, insights, and resources to add and prioritize; connecting with Global Security teams at Microsoft, Engineering and Product teams to remove blockers and influence the solution roadmap.
- Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with CISOs, security practitioners, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders.
- Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer’s security posture and roadmap, complex technical requirements and issues and various technical strategies being proposed.
- Actively listens, creates, and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures/solutions and approaches.
- Addresses security requirements/issues/strategies with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer.
- Supports customer skilling by leading discussions on technical delivery with other internal and external stakeholders as a technical thought leader to influence customer readiness.
- Guides other team members to focus on customer experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience and shares best practices with the wider internal team.
- Business Impact
- Drives their team in operating and optimizing complex and high-impact situations for strategic customers in collaboration with internal stakeholders (e.g., Sales Specialists, Customer Success Account Managers, other Account Team members, Product Groups).
- Anticipates and manages business and security risks, and adapts methodology (e.g. Zero Trust, Security Adoption Framework) and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and security risks.
- Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
- Owns complex customers relationships to anticipate, identify, propose resolution, and lead removal of technical blockers through regular security reviews and check-ins to accelerate consumption and usage.
- Proactively uses deep knowledge of the security portfolio, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer conversations and to propose and coach others to develop new solutions to scale across multiple customers while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios.
- Creates opportunities to expand or accelerate security usage and consumption (including through security related managed intellectual property) and leads these customer conversations.
- Leads the adoption of Microsoft’s Security offerings based on analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).
- Technical Leadership
- Leverages market insights to assist leadership in defining global security vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling. Role models effective security skilling and influences team to drive their own technical readiness. Drives and engages others to adapt to changes aligned with SA priorities. Acts as a mentor to less experienced colleagues by educating them on security and professional developmental concepts and sharing best practices.
- Leads v