Architect – Data & AI

Microsoft Industry Solutions - Global Center Innovation and Delivery Center (GCID) delivers end-to-end solutions by enabling accelerated adoption and productive use of Microsoft technologies. An organization of well over 1000+ exceptional people, GCID presents a great opportunity for highly skilled services professionals to make a foray into consulting, solution development and delivery roles.

The Architect is a senior leader responsible for the successful technical execution and delivery of complex client projects across diverse domains. This role acts as a strategic anchor between clients, leadership team, delivery managers, project managers, and delivery team(s). In the AI-first GCID organization, Architects are expected to embed AI-native thinking into delivery models, ensuring solutions are intelligent, scalable, and aligned with business outcomes. The ideal candidate is passionate about technology, demonstrates breadth of expertise, and advocates for solutions that deliver true client value.

AI-First Delivery Leadership

• Embed AI-first mindset into delivery workflows, leveraging automation and intelligent orchestration where applicable.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of complex projects, ensuring solutions are scalable, robust, and aligned with client business outcomes.
• Drive engineering excellence through reusable components, accelerators, and scalable architecture.
• Oversee technical execution across multiple projects, ensuring adherence to best practices, quality standards, and compliance requirements.
• Collaborate with clients and internal stakeholders to define strategies, delivery plans, milestones, and risk mitigation approaches.
• Act as a technical point of contact for clients, translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Ensure delivery models are optimized for modern AI-native execution, including integration of automation and intelligent processes.
• Ability to step into at‑risk projects, quickly assess issues, and establish a credible path to recovery or exit.

Engineering Excellence

Promote high-quality architecture and ensure integrity and performance across delivery. Establish secure coding, test-driven development, observability, and performance standards as defaults. Support ongoing learning and certifications to stay current. Advance adoption of modern methodologies like Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD for scalable solutions. Cultivate technical rigor, innovation, and accountability within the team.

Innovation & Thought Leadership

Apply AI-driven design for user-focused solutions that support business, architecture, and delivery goals. Assess modern technologies to guide strategy. Drive innovation in delivery methods and reusable tools to boost efficiency. Promote best practices and continuous improvement across teams.

Client Engagement & Solutioning

Engage with clients to assess their needs and provide guidance throughout projects. Additionally, assist pre-sales teams by preparing estimates, demonstrating products, and developing proposals. Maintain strong client relationships to ensure ongoing satisfaction and deliver value.

Team Management & Mentorship

Lead cross-functional teams to encourage learning, collaboration, and technical excellence. Review work, give feedback, and support team members' growth.

Quality & Compliance

Ensure secure, compliant, and reliable solution delivery through secure coding, test driven‑ development, observability, design reviews, and quality gates across all engagements.

Other 

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications & Preferred Skills

• 20+ years of experience in software/solution engineering, with at least 10–15 years as Architect and Delivery leadership roles.
• Proven experience in leading delivery of complex, multi-disciplinary projects.
• Strong understanding of delivery methodologies (Agile, Scrum, DevOps, etc.) and adopt emerging practices for faster Go To Market (GTM) using Hyper Velocity Engineering
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and team leadership skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Relevant certifications are a plus.

Areas of Expertise

Enterprise Data Architecture & Modern Platforms

• Lead enterprise data modernization initiatives in close collaboration with Customer, team and Enterprise Architects, spanning assessment, target‑state design, and optimization.
• Drive and influence architectural decisions for modern data platforms, providing hands‑on delivery leadership across Microsoft, Microsoft Purview, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and partner platforms such as Snowflake and Teradata.
• Partner with Customer teams, cross functional Architects on workload characterization, environment separation, capacity planning, balancing performance, scalability, resilience, and total cost of ownership.
• Share accountability with Delivery Managers, Development team for production rollout, owning performance outcomes, operational stability, and long‑term sustainability through continuous optimization and issue resolution.

Data Engineering & Large Scale Data Processing

• Hands‑on leadership in designing, building, and operating large‑scale batch and streaming data pipelines using Apache Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, and HDInsight.
• Own data engineering standards, SLAs, SLOs, and performance baselines, while actively implementing and reviewing critical pipelines.
• Lead and perform performance assessments, compute sizing, partition strategies and concurrency management.
• Drive AIOps, DataOps practices in monitoring, alerting, capacity scaling, and continuous optimization.

Database Platforms, Performance & Capacity Engineering

• Hands‑on expertise across Azure SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, Cosmos DB, and columnar analytics engines.
• Lead and execute database performance assessments, capacity planning, and workload sizing for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads.
• Perform query tuning, execution plan analysis, indexing strategy design, wait state analysis (e.g., CXPACKET), and storage/I/O optimization.
• Accountable for delivering predictable, scalable, and cost efficient database performance in production.

AI First Data Engineering & Unify Your Data

• Design and implement agentic AI workflows that assist in data discovery, preparation, profiling, validation, and performance optimization.
• Actively adopt and promote use large language models to automate data engineering tasks such as schema inference, pipeline generation, metadata enrichment, documentation, and tuning recommendations.
• Lead AI powered data wrangling solutions, while maintaining governance, explainability, and human in the loop controls.
• Accountable for operationalizing autonomous assisted data platforms in real customer environments.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement

• Architecture definition to integrate AI and ML workloads into data platforms, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
• Design, lead to implement, and optimize solutions using AI Agents where viable using Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Services, including RAG pipelines and inference workloads.
• Ensure AI and analytics solutions are grounded help improving trust, explainability, and relevance of AI outputs.
• Tune AI systems for retrieval latency, inference performance, concurrency, and cost, using telemetry and real usage patterns.
• Embed observability, monitoring, drift detection, and performance metrics into production AI systems.
• Ensure Responsible AI principles are applied in all AI solutions.
• Balance governance, performance, and usability by implementing governance by default patterns that scale self-service access without introducing friction

Solutioning, Pre-Sales & Technical Leadership 

• Lead technical solutioning, estimations, and support architecture design during pre-sales and delivery shaping. 
• Translate business outcomes into clear architecture, execution plans, and risk mitigation strategies. 
• Influence technical direction across multiple teams and engagements. 
• Act as a trusted advisor to clients and internal leadership 

Frontier Consulting Skills

• Full Stack Engineering
• Lead rapid prototyping, pilots, and early-stage deployments for enterprise customers 
• Ability to go from whiteboard to production with minimal friction 
• Strong troubleshooting and production support expertise, including performance, reliability, and security issues 
• Outcome driven engineering focused on business impact, not activity 
• Adopt Hyper Velocity Engineering (HVE) methodology for rapid production deployment of AI Services
• Building reusable assets, accelerators, and reference implementations 
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, high-pressure environments with C-Level customer stakeholders 

Personal Attributes

• Passion for technology and innovation.
• Ability to interact confidently with senior leaders and clients.
• Strong decision-making skills and a consultative mindset.
• Flexibility to manage a fast-moving, ambiguous consulting environment.
• Commitment to continuous learning on emerging technologies

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.