Cloud Solution Architect - Infrastructure
About the job
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, plus 7 or more years of relevant experience supporting mission-critical production environments, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience supporting mission-critical production environments.
- Experience leading or coordinating Severity A / Priority 1 incidents.
- Experience providing recommendations to enterprise customers.
- Experience improving reliability, resiliency, performance, security, or operational maturity.
- Experience working across multiple time zones and globally distributed teams.
- Experience coordinating multiple technical teams to resolve customer issues.
- Experience with telemetry, monitoring, logging, and root-cause analysis.
- Experience with disaster recovery, high availability, business continuity planning, and recovery planning.
- Advise customers on improving the reliability, resiliency, security, performance, and operational maturity of mission-critical workloads running on Azure.
- Advise customers and stakeholders on architecture, operations, and practices aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
- Understand customer priorities, advocate for customers within Microsoft, and drive outcomes measured through customer satisfaction, operational excellence, and business impact.
- Build technical relationships with customers and Microsoft stakeholders through technical expertise and guidance.
- Communicate complex technical concepts and recommendations clearly and actionably to technical and executive audiences.
- Lead complex troubleshooting across infrastructure, platform, and application layers, including critical and high-severity incidents.
- Use platform expertise and customer business context to accelerate incident mitigation, recovery, and service restoration.
- Facilitate root-cause analysis for critical incidents and help customers identify corrective and preventative actions.
- Analyze support cases, operational telemetry, incident trends, and platform events to identify recurring risks and recommend proactive remediation.
- Reduce reactive operational demand through reliability-focused recommendations, operational maturity improvements, resiliency practices, and service optimization.
- Promote operational excellence across reliability, availability, security, performance, recoverability, and capacity management.
- Perform proactive health assessments, risk reviews, and operational analysis to identify improvement opportunities and prevent escalations.
- Investigate systemic factors, historical decisions, and operational patterns to drive long-term improvements beyond immediate symptoms and root causes.
- Correlate customer requirements, operational events, and platform signals into actionable recommendations with clear accountability and ownership.
- Drive operational maturity through recommendations for observability, monitoring, automation, governance, reliability engineering, disaster recovery preparedness, and service management processes.
- Use telemetry, monitoring platforms, observability tools, and query languages to investigate issues, identify trends, and develop actionable insights.
- Develop and maintain a deep technical understanding of assigned customer environments, architectures, dependencies, and mission-critical workloads.
- Create and maintain customer knowledge documentation, operational records (KnowMe), and workload profiles.
- Deliver onboarding assessments and help define service delivery and improvement plans aligned with customer objectives.
- Scope technical engagements, facilitate discussions on workstreams, prioritize recommendations, and align stakeholders on action plans and expected outcomes.
- Track remediation progress and drive alignment among customers and Microsoft stakeholders.
- Collaborate with teams across regions and time zones in a global follow-the-sun support model to ensure continuity for mission-critical workloads.
- Maintain awareness of customer engagements, incidents, escalations, and engineering activities outside local business hours and incorporate developments into service delivery.
- Coordinate across time zones through structured handoffs, action tracking, stakeholder alignment, and knowledge sharing.
- Partner with Microsoft Engineering, Support, Customer Success, Product Groups, and other stakeholders to accelerate issue resolution and drive customer outcomes.
- Communicate technical and operational topics clearly across diverse technical, business, and cultural audiences.
- Establish trusted technical relationships with customers and Microsoft stakeholders to support critical incidents, proactive engagements, and strategic initiatives.
- Build partnerships across Microsoft teams, including Engineering, Azure Engineering Direct, Azure Rapid Response, Customer Success Account Managers, and Support.
- Coordinate effectively across teams, cultures, and organizational boundaries to drive customer success and operational improvements.
About the company
Microsoft builds workplace software, operating systems and cloud infrastructure for consumers, businesses and government agencies, from small organizations to global enterprises. Microsoft 365 combines Word and Excel with Teams communication and Copilot AI features, while Windows runs PCs and Surface supplies the company's own computers. Azure rents computing capacity, storage and databases to build and run web applications. Microsoft also sells Xbox consoles and games, collecting revenue through software licenses, subscriptions, usage charges and product sales. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Redmond, Washington
Founded
1975
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- US corporate staff receive education support: eligible, approved graduate coursework qualifies for up to $10,000 annually.
- Cloud demand expands: July 2026 results showed Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 43% year-over-year in fiscal Q4.
- Investment has an earnings cushion: July 2026 results reported $155.2 billion consolidated operating profit for fiscal 2026.
What critics are saying
- Performance reviews include security: every Microsoft employee must discuss their security contribution with their manager.
- Office flexibility depends on the role: Microsoft's postings specify requirements ranging from fully remote to fully on-site.
- Cloud capacity faces local limits: Microsoft describes power-grid delays and water constraints affecting US datacenter expansion.
What makes Microsoft unique
- Hybrid customers stay within reach: Azure Arc manages servers across customer datacenters and competing clouds.
- Developer reach extends beyond Azure: Microsoft's GitHub hosts code collaboration alongside AI coding tools.
- Professional data widens its business: Microsoft owns LinkedIn's recruiting, advertising and workplace-learning network.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
401(k) Company Match
Professional Development Budget
Conference Attendance Budget
Flexible Work Hours
Remote Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
0%1 year growth
0%2 year growth
0%Investor Michael Burry, known for calling the 2008 housing crash, has warned that Microsoft and other big tech firms carry roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI data-center liabilities. He said the companies are spending heavily because they assume they will get an oligopoly "too big to fail." Microsoft's capital spending in the June quarter was $41 billion, up 70% from a year ago. Its commercial remaining performance obligations, or contracted revenue not yet recognised, exceed $678 billion. Fourth-quarter revenue rose 18% to $90 billion, and net income rose 31% to $35.8 billion. Azure passed $100 billion in annual revenue. Shares are up 41% in three months. Analysts' consensus rating is "Strong Buy," with an average price target of $577.98.
Arena Physica has made Heaviside, its foundation model for electromagnetism, available on Microsoft Discovery, Microsoft's platform for agentic engineering. The company announced the move on October 13, 2026. Heaviside-1 has 350 million parameters and was trained on 250,000 3D field simulations. It predicts a design's full 3D electromagnetic field response in milliseconds, roughly 100,000 times faster than a traditional solver, and within a decibel of commercial accuracy. Traditional solvers can take hours or days per run, which makes design verification the main bottleneck. On Discovery, an agent can switch between Heaviside's predictions and a full-fidelity solver for final validation. Arena Physica expects strong uptake in semiconductors, including BGA packaging and SerDes interconnects. Discovery also offers audit logging and access controls to protect sensitive designs.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said power and physical infrastructure could be the lasting constraints in the AI race. He posted on X on Monday, after Microsoft announced its own silicon chips. Palihapitiya wrote that chipmakers will move up the stack while application companies move down it, so "everyone competes with everyone." He asked whether distribution, a data moat, or a physical limit such as power would support long-term margins. Elon Musk replied that scaling power, fast construction, cooling, networking, and batteries "is hard." Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said the company will scale its Maia chips to multi-gigawatt deployments starting next year. He said the Maia 300 delivers 40% more tokens per watt than leading GPU-based systems.
Peter Lee, who recently announced his departure as president of Microsoft Science, plans to join the Mercedes Formula 1 team as an AI advisor, he told Fortune. The role is newly created, and his title is still under discussion. Lee spent 16 years at Microsoft. At Mercedes, he will use AI to tackle car physics problems, break down data silos, build financial and predictive models, and advise on how regulators might govern AI in the sport. He is expected to sign a one-year contract with an option for a second. "I have always wanted to be a racer," Lee said. His exit follows other Microsoft departures this year, including Ryan Roslansky and Frank X. Shaw.
Microsoft has unveiled its latest homegrown Maia chips, part of an effort to rely less on outside semiconductor makers for its AI ambitions, Bloomberg reports. Elon Musk, meanwhile, wants to speed up chip development by testing as many as 10 new designs a year. Apple is also set to unveil its new smart home strategy, which seeks to fill a major gap in its ecosystem.