Cloud Solution Architect - Microsoft Canada, Vancouver

About this opportunity

Microsoft Canada's Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is dedicated to empowering customers to achieve business value through Microsoft’s products and services. This global team drives cross-company alignment to exceed customers’ expectations, providing consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions. Join CE&S to help accelerate AI transformation for customers and the world.

We are seeking a highly technical, hands-on Cloud Solution Architect - Factory to join our innovative team. This role is central to driving Infrastructure and Application Migrations via the Cloud Acceleration Factory. Ideal candidates are solution-focused, possess strong technical skills, and have a passion for project management. The Cloud Acceleration Factory offers a unique opportunity to provide feedback directly to Microsoft’s core product teams, influencing platform improvements.

As a senior individual contributor, Cloud Solution Architects operate globally, engaging directly with customers. This is a hands-on technical and governance role, spanning design, build, and production phases. You will comfortably switch between high-level architectural discussions and detailed keyboard-level implementation. This exciting position offers unique and challenging technical problems to solve, directly contributing to customers’ success with Azure and other Microsoft cloud solutions.

Responsibilities

As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) within the Cloud & AI Platforms Global Customer Success team, you will focus on securing the modernization and migration of customer workloads on Azure. Your responsibilities will include:

• Play a pivotal role in the Azure Application Migrations Factory, providing technical enablement, operational support, and strategic engagement across customer projects.
• Ensure successful delivery of AI solutions, troubleshoot complex issues, and support innovation through pilot evaluations and advanced use case development.
• Understand customers' overall data estate, business priorities, and IT success measures, innovating with AI solutions that drive business value.
• Facilitate scalable delivery through strong technical program management utilizing a factory model/approach, driving program awareness and demand across regional operating units.
• Attend in-flight project status meetings to monitor progress and identify support needs.
• Engage directly with complex or non-standard customer use cases beyond existing accelerators.
• Participate in intake reviews for milestone sizing, objection handling, and technical scoping.
• Ensure Solution Excellence: Deliver solutions with high performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, reusability, and reliability upon deployment. Gather insights from customers and partners.

• Drive Consumption Growth: Develop opportunities to enhance Customer Success and help customers extract value from their Microsoft investments.
• Operational Awareness: Understand consumption metrics and their reflection on program effectiveness, collaborating with local teams for nominations and intake support.
• Unblock Customer Challenges: Leverage subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers, following best practices and utilizing repeatable IP.
• Identify and contribute repeatable IP and assets that create velocity in deployment and drive customer value from their Unified investment, continuously improving these assets.
• Evaluate pilot opportunities for potential integration into existing offerings.
• Architect Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations Solutions: Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs. Create innovative Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations roadmaps, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.

• Advocate for Customers: Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Factory team to address key blockers, and influence improvements, roadmap, and feature prioritization.
• Resolve technical blockers: Debug technical issues and provide fixes for engagements encountering blockers.
• Continuous Learning: Stay updated on market trends, collaborate with the Analytics & AI technical community, and educate customers about GitHub Copilot and the Azure AI platform.
• Accelerate Outcomes: Engage with field teams, share expertise, drive factory pipeline, and promote the Factory to accelerate customer success, collating feedback for improvement.

Qualifications

To excel in this Cloud Solution Architect role, candidates should possess a strong foundation in cloud technologies and a commitment to customer success.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 4+ 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 Business Applications consulting OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Reliability Status security screening with the Government of Canada.

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in one or more of the following:
• Deep Domain Expertise in Azure Application Migrations Areas: Domain expertise in one of the Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations specific areas OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.
• Programming Languages and Integration: Knowledge with Java, .NET, JavaScript, Python or similar programming languages in the context of application development, and ability to integrate GitHub Copilot and Azure AI with other services (e.g., Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Docker, API Management). Also, enterprise-scale technical experience and depth with one or more areas of the Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations (Azure core technologies including Apps, compute, networking, storage, and databases, along with identity, security, and monitoring services for cloud solutions).
• Architecting Enterprise-Grade Solutions: The ability to create and explain 3-tier architecture diagrams, system context diagrams, system interaction diagrams, etc. Proven experience building enterprise-grade, Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application-focused solutions on the cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) for customers, from Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) leading to production deployments.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Deployment: Understanding of Bicep, Terraform, or Azure Resource Manager and familiarity with configuration and deployment of IaC templates in a secure environment.
• Competitive Landscape: Understanding the competitive landscape is valuable, candidates should be aware of key AI platforms beyond Azure, such as AWS and GCP.