Principal Architect
Microsoft
Principal Architect
Microsoft
Builds workplace software, PCs and cloud services
At Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP), we build and continually reinvent the technology behind Microsoft's Customer Service & Support (CSS) and Customer Success Unit (CSU) businesses. We sit inside the Office of the CTO (OCTO), part of MCAPS-Core, where product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners come together around one goal: accelerating customer outcomes and business growth. OCTO shapes where Microsoft invests in emerging technology, sets technical direction, and leads the company's highest-priority AI initiatives, with impact reaching across Microsoft, industry, and society. Engineering carries that mission into the technology behind customer support and success, working alongside ITP's strategy, delivery, and productivity teams, and organized around three pillars of its own: Innovation, Production, and a shared Tech Ops function that keeps every squad running. Joining ITP means turning new ideas into production-ready solutions and running technology on a real scale, so customers get to value faster and strengthen loyalty.
We are seeking a Partner Architect to define and drive the long-term architecture for business-critical products, platforms, and services. This role brings together the disciplines of Solution Architecture and Software Engineering to translate business strategy, customer needs, product direction, and technology trends into coherent logical and physical architectures that teams can implement and operate at scale.
You will lead through technical depth, judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries. You will mentor software engineers, prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems the organization faces and review the most consequential architectural decisions. You will operate from enterprise and ecosystem context down to component topology and implementation detail, providing clarity in ambiguous situations and remaining grounded in engineering reality through design validation, prototypes, code and implementation reviews, operational data, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams.
This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an architect who can connect strategy to execution: defining where the platform must go, documenting why, creating standards that scale, and partnering with teams to deliver the architecture incrementally without disrupting customers or business operations.
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.
- Define, launch, and lead the ITP architecture guild as the cross-organization community of practice for architects and senior engineers, owning its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms so that standards, patterns, tools, and lessons learned scale across teams.
- Set and evolve architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technology choices, and guardrails that enable consistent, high-quality decisions and reduce ambiguity and rework across teams.
- Drive AI adoption and transformation through architecture, defining the AI-first reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails (agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI) that teams across ITP, CSS, CSU, and MCAPS use to adopt AI safely and consistently.
- Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, engineering, and product groups so that a single architecture practice spans planning, funding, design, delivery, and operations.
- Develop, run, and continuously improve the architecture review process, including intake and triage criteria, objective quality bars, the reviewer pool, architecture decision records, escalation paths, and measures of adoption, cycle time, and outcome quality.
- Lead reviews of the most consequential products and programs, ensuring decisions are documented with context, options, tradeoffs, risks, and rejected alternatives, and are understood, implemented, measured, and revisited as conditions change.
- Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking logical architectures spanning domains, capabilities, bounded contexts, services, data flows, integrations, APIs, identity, security boundaries, and user or system interaction patterns.
- Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking physical architectures spanning deployment topology, compute, storage, networking, data platforms, service placement, geographic distribution, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, capacity, and operational supportability.
- Coach teams in translating functional and nonfunctional requirements into architecture specifications and diagrams that move from enterprise and system context to detailed component, data, network, identity, and deployment views.
- Aid in the development of a pro-code golden path: the paved, opinionated, well-documented set of languages, frameworks, platform services, templates, scaffolding, and CI/CD pipelines that represent the supported way to build and ship software in ITP.
- Aid in the development of the golden loop: an instrumented inner and outer developer loop spanning local development, AI-assisted coding, code review, test, build, deploy, monitor, and feedback, so that velocity, quality, and developer experience are measurable and continuously improved.
- Mentor software engineers across levels, including principal and senior engineers and architects, through design coaching, code and design reviews, pairing, and career guidance, raising architectural capability across the organization
- Prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems facing the organization and validate high-risk or novel design elements through working prototypes, benchmarks, modeling, simulations, and technical spikes before teams commit to irreversible paths.
- Contribute production-quality reference implementations, templates, and sample code that make the golden path concrete and immediately usable by engineering teams.
- Identify architectural gaps, design cliffs, concentration risks, systemic dependencies, obsolete technologies, and accumulated technical debt, and prioritize investments that improve long-term agility and reduce operational and business risk.
- Define target-state architecture and sequenced transition roadmaps that connect the current state to the target state through practical, incremental steps while maintaining compatibility, service continuity, and customer trust.
- Help teams balance tradeoffs across reliability, security, privacy, safety, accessibility, performance, scalability, sustainability, maintainability, time to market, and total cost of ownership.
- Use telemetry, capacity and cost models, reliability data, security findings, incident learnings, customer feedback, and technology-market signals to evaluate architecture health and guide continuous evolution.
- Communicate complex architectures and decisions in terms appropriate for engineering, business, and executive audiences, and build trusted technical relationships with senior leaders, customers, and partners.
- Represent the organization in strategic architecture discussions and contribute reusable intellectual property, technical guidance, and thought leadership across Microsoft and the broader ecosystem.
- Embody our culture and values.
To be successful in this role: architecture grounded in engineering. This is not an ivory-tower architecture role. The successful candidate will be able to connect strategy, logical design, and physical design to implementable engineering decisions; validate high-risk assumptions with evidence; and stay engaged through implementation, deployment, operation, and architectural evolution.
Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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.
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.
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