Principal Solution Architect - Application Innovation

Our network of global Microsoft Innovation Hubs are premium customer-facing facilities built to help enterprise customers solve their business challenges through innovative cross-workload solutions. We accelerate our customers’ digital transformation by capitalizing on the changing needs of our customers and the new business opportunities of tomorrow.

In our Microsoft Innovation Hub located in Houston, TX, we are looking to hire a Principal Solution Architect with Application Innovation subject matter expertise where you will be a trusted customer advisor in the following Application Innovation technologies: App Migration and Modernization, Microservice and Serverless Architecture, Container Architecture, Edge Computing and IoT plus preferred knowledge of cloud native technologies.

As a Principal Solution Architect - Application Innovation, you will have the opportunity to shape and drive the infrastructure strategy and vision for our clients and partners. You will collaborate with other Architects who specialize in different solution areas, such as Azure Core Infrastructure, Data AI, Modern Work, and Security.

As a Principal Solution Architect - Application Innovation onsite in the Houston Innovation Hub, you will be working at the forefront of Microsoft innovation, helping customers create and implement a vision and strategy for their digital transformation. You will be an integral part of their transformation journey, challenging their ways of thinking and helping them realize and adopt the benefits of our Cloud. Part of a world-wide community of peers, you’ll have access to the latest software and hardware, and you’ll be given the time and budget to develop as a globally influential technical leader.

This role is Microsoft onsite only. By applying to this U.S. based position, relocation is not provided for the role.

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
• Deliver customer engagements: Based at your facility location, you will prepare and deliver technical engagements to enterprise customers. These include strategy session, envisioning workshop, architecture design sessions, building of rapid prototypes, workshops, and hackathons. You take a cross-solution view to leverage capabilities across the entire Microsoft cloud platform. You will work collaboratively with account teams to determine the best engagements for a given opportunity to maximize customer benefit and accelerate deals success.
• Solution design: Using your technical knowledge, architectural approach, consultancy skills and our methodology to win a customer’s technical decision to buy and use Microsoft solutions and cloud services.
• Set vision: You will use your technical knowledge to show customers an inspiring digital vision, across all Microsoft workloads, as well as deeper engagement in your core technology specialism. You will make this digital vision real using the architecture skills of you and your peers to provide a complete solution.
• Build strategy: You will map the agreed customer vision into a strategy for implementation, resolving concerns, removing technical blockers, and validating a significant business case for investment. You will work with the customer, wider account team resources and our partners to orchestrate a roadmap for implementation.
• A community leader: You will use your knowledge from working with multiple customers to influence product and community. You will enable your peer community to extend their impact through researching, creating and extending complex technical demonstrations in our global demo tenant. You will shape product direction through building relationships with global engineering teams to propagate customer feedback and scenarios, and ensure gaps and whitespace is understood.
• Grow your knowledge and external brand: We encourage all our employees to continuously maintain and enhance their technical, sales, professional skills, and competitive readiness. Your knowledge will be enhanced and shared by participating in internal Microsoft technical communities and in the broader industry through events, blogs, whitepapers, training, and articles for your domain. You will be recognized for sharing, learning, and driving individual work that all result in business impact for customers, partners and within Microsoft. Microsoft encourages leadership from every employee.
• A Trusted Resource in Application Innovation: Guide business and technical decision makers on creating business value leveraging our technical solutions. Synthesize business and technical architecture requirements. Serve as the as the go-to technical trusted resource in Application Innovation space with a specific focus on: Microsoft Power Platform, Azure DevOps, GitHub, CI/CD and no code / low-code development; Power Apps, Dynamics 365, SharePoint and Teams; Web application server technologies; Programming languages such as C++, C#, Java, Node.js, JSON, PHP, Python; scalable architectures using App Service, API Management, serverless technologies, container orchestration; integrated development environments such as Visual Studio, Xcode, WebSphere targeting Android, iOS, Linux, Window, public clouds. Design and develop industry and platform experiences and demonstrations that leverage both Microsoft and third-party solutions to educate, illuminate and inspire customers.
• Other
• Embody our Culture and Values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications
• 7+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• 7+ years technical enterprise experience working in software design, development for both web and cloud applications.
• 5+ years of experience in Azure application development and architecture, including, but not limited to App Migration and Modernization, Microservices and Serverless technologies, Containers and Kubernetes, API Management Architecture, Edge Computing and IoT

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications (PQs)
• Structured facilitator. Validated customer experience in requirements capture; prioritization; capturing evidence and impact to quantify business value; issue, risk and constraint identification.
• Technical Intermediate level experience across the full range of Cloud Native and Microsoft cloud solutions – Azure Developer, Azure infrastructure, Azure data, artificial intelligence, business applications, modern workplace and productivity, security, business applications. Demonstrated experience of solution architectures which span multiple workloads.
• Design Thinking. Proven experience of delivering design thinking; ‘ideation’; or similar context analysis / problem framing.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, certifications)
• Familiarity with LangChain, Semantic Kernel and other GenAI Orchestration Frameworks.
• DevOps practices, including continuous planning/Agile, CI/CD, quality, and security and one of the DevOps tool chains (i.e, Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab).
• Programming languages: Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Scala, Go, Swift, Node.js, JavaScript
• Integrated development environments experience (e.g., Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, XCode, WebSphere) targeting Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, public clouds (i.e. Azure, AWS, Google).

Technology Specialists IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $12+,200 - $248,800 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 $162,000 - $268,+00 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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 3, 2025.

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. Read more