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 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.  Support for Mission Critical is a team within Microsoft that provides solution-specific expertise designed to drive peak health and optimum performance of a customer’s most important solutions. As a key technical resource for the customer, you will be primarily focused on delivering proactive services such as education workshops, delivering assessments, and providing tailored guidance. Troubleshooting skills are essential as this role will include working with Microsoft Support to expedite incident resolution.   This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home We are looking for an experienced Cloud Solution Architect with deep expertise in Azure PaaS and Azure AI services. The ideal candidate will architect, design, and deliver scalable cloud-native solutions leveraging Microsoft Azure’s PaaS and AI portfolio. This role involves hands-on development, architecture design, customer engagement, and driving AI adoption across enterprise applications. **Responsibilities** + Provide architectural reviews and technical guidance to Support for Mission Critical (SfMC) customers, focusing on the reliability, security, and performance of Azure PaaS and AI workloads.* Take end-to-end ownership and accountability of technical deliverables, ensuring alignment with customer business outcomes and Microsoft’s best practices.* Identify architectural risks, design gaps, and operational inefficiencies across services like Azure App Service, Azure Functions, API Management, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure OpenAI, and recommend actionable remediations.* Engage with SfMC stakeholders to drive architectural validation, incident prevention, and workload health improvements through proactive engagements and deep technical assessments.* Champion responsible AI adoption by advising on governance, ethical usage, and technical integration of Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services within mission-critical applications.* Collaborate closely with Microsoft engineering and support teams to address escalations, share feedback, and align solutions with platform evolution.* Drive creation and reusability of IP including scripts, tools, and technical documentation to support scalable SfMC engagements.* Act as a trusted advisor to customer architects and engineers, influencing long-term technical strategy for stability, resilience, and innovation. **Qualifications** + **5+ years of hands-on technical engineering experience** with one or more programming languages such as C#, Python, Java, JavaScript, or TypeScript. + **5+ years of experience in architecting and developing enterprise-grade applications** using **Azure PaaS services** , including but not limited to: + Azure App Services + Azure Functions + Azure API Management + Azure Container Apps / AKS / ACI + Proven expertise in designing **microservices-based architectures** , serverless patterns, and containerized workloads. + Experience in **AI/ML model integration** into cloud applications using: + **Azure OpenAI** + **Azure Cognitive Services (Vision, Language, Search, Speech, etc.)** + **Azure AI Studio / AI Foundry** + Strong understanding of DevOps/DevSecOps practices with proficiency in tools such as GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps Pipelines. + Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using **Bicep** , **Terraform** , or **ARM templates** . + Demonstrated experience with **monitoring and diagnostics** using **Azure Monitor** , **App Insights** , **Log Analytics** , **Grafana** , or **Prometheus** . + Outstanding communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience delivering technical guidance to developers, architects, and business stakeholders. + Ability to thrive in fast-paced and ambiguous environments while driving clarity and business outcomes. **Additional** **Qualifications:** + Strong expertise in **.NET Core** , **.NET Framework** , or Python-based backend services. + Familiarity with the **Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework** and **Well-Architected Framework** . + Working knowledge of **Azure Security Center** , **Managed Identities** , **RBAC** , and **network security** in cloud environments. + Hands-on experience with **CI/CD automation** , container registries, and Helm charts. + Familiarity with relational and NoSQL services such as **Azure SQL** , **Cosmos DB** , or **PostgreSQL Hyperscale** . + Knowledge of **multi-cloud environments** (AWS/GCP) is a plus. + Experience integrating AI into line-of-business applications or chat-based interfaces using **Microsoft Copilot** or **Conversational AI tools** . + Strong customer obsession and a growth mindset. 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) .