Overview
With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers' expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft's portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.
The Customer Advocacy's team mission is to incubate and scale innovative new business models and customer experiences. The team leverages adaptive leadership principles to drive large-scale change and transform business models across SME&C (Small, Medium Enterprises & Channel), Digital Natives & ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), Education, Public Sector, Health and Life Sciences and other industry-specific customer segments.
Senior Cloud Solution Architect - Developer Experience (Digital Natives & ISVs) provides senior technical leadership to early-stage, high-engineering customers by guiding architectural decisions, improving developer workflows, and establishing scalable cloud and AI patterns that accelerate Azure alignment and developer productivity.
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
Early-Stage Architectural Leadership
Engage with high-engineering-density Digital Native and ISV customers that meet Dev CoE criteria (early architectural lock-in risk and developer-experience constraints).
Serve as senior technical advisor to founders, CTOs, platform leaders, and Staff+ engineering stakeholders.Guide design of secure, scalable, AI-enabled architectures using Azure AI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, cloud-native compute, and modern engineering practices.
Lead design reviews, modernization discussions, and deep architectural evaluations that influence long-term technical direction.
Remove early engineering blockers by coordinating subject-matter experts and establishing clear architectural patterns.
Developer Experience & AI Thought Leadership
Shape early developer workflows, tooling decisions, and AI-assisted engineering practices within high-velocity teams.
Drive adoption of Copilot, intelligent IDE workflows, and emerging agentic DevOps approaches.
Align customer engineering strategies with Microsoft's platform roadmap, supporting informed technical decisions at critical early milestones.
Pattern Development & Global Field Scalability
Translate recurring customer scenarios into reusable architecture patterns, templates, guides, and validated design scenarios.
Contribute to global communities of practice across CSAs and developer engineering teams.
Provide recurring, high-quality product feedback to Azure, GitHub, and PG engineering based on early-stage customer use cases.
Capture and distribute patterns that prevent repeated architectural pitfalls across Digital Native and ISV ecosystems.
Business Impact & Organizational Alignment
Drive measurable customer impact through improved developer velocity, stronger architectural foundations, and early Azure alignment.
Partner with account-aligned CSAs, CSAMs, AEs, and engineering teams to ensure cohesive customer engagement.
Support FY27 Digital Native segmentation by enabling a consistent, repeatable early-stage engagement model.
Maintain operational rigor across governance, delivery excellence, time tracking, and cross-team alignment.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 7+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
OR equivalent experience.
Experience working directly with developers, platform teams, and engineering leadership.
Ability to lead architectural strategy discussions and influence senior technical decision-makers.
Strong depth in cloud-native engineering, including microservices, APIs, containers, CI/CD, GitHub, DevOps, and observability practices.
Hands-on expertise in AI/ML systems, vector search, RAG patterns, Azure AI Foundry, or modern agentic architecture approaches.
Proven ability to create reusable architecture patterns, technical IP, or engineering best practices.
Other Requirements
This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
OR equivalent experience.
6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
6+ years experience leading technical projects.
Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
Experience with Digital Native or ISV customer environments.
Familiarity with developer productivity tooling and AI-assisted SDLC workflows.
Ability to influence engineering strategy across multiple customers or geographies.
Demonstrated experience partnering with product engineering teams across Azure, GitHub, or PG.
Cloud Solution Architecture IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $165,600 - $272,300 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. 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 with religious accommodations 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)
