Director of Architecture

Overview

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their outstanding each day. Growth mindset encourages each of us to lean in and learn what matters most to our customers, to create the foundational knowledge that enables us to make customer-first decisions in everything we do. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

Responsibilities

People Management 

Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. 

Model - Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. 

Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. 

Care - Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others. 

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment 

Provides support for their team in gathering and propagating customer/partner insights to help shape and form both the definition and ongoing execution of the project. Holds teams accountable for mapping architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes, and ensures that proposed solutions are aligned with broader organizational strategy. Leverages prior work, customer/partner insights, and industry trends, and shares insights with team to apply. 

Supports their team in working with customer/partner stakeholders (e.g., Enterprise Architects, Security Team, Development Team, Operations Team) and business sponsor to socialize both the business solution and the project approach. Advises team on managing changes and facilitating feedback. Uses broad patterns of feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights and presents a compelling business case to program managers that influences product roadmaps and decision making. Contributes to Microsoft-centric operations and cadences to align with customer feedback. 

Drives internal advocacy by facilitating insight sharing with Product Engineering teams, and providing guidance through escalation, acceleration, and prioritization. Looks across multiple customers/partners for opportunities to consolidate and prioritize items across the business. Mentors peers and teams on best practices around internal resources usage. When appropriate, establishes accountabilities to drive customer outcomes and ensure internal stakeholders are in place. Ensures that customer opportunities, questions, and/or issues are brought to the appropriate internal teams. 

Architecture Design and Deployment

Holds teams accountable for leveraging existing architecture approaches to achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer/partner and developing new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners and markets. When appropriate, governs areas of fiscal responsibility, through delivery team, staying within budget while driving engagement profitability and risk management.

Guides team in defining and documenting the architecture through an architecture description document, an architecture decisions log, and a requirements/constraints traceability matrix. Ensures team is equipped to communicate the value proposition of the business solution along with the project approach. Guides team in cost-based and technology-based discussions to explain the architecture in terms of its build, deployment, and ongoing operational use to determine customer appetite for the business solution. Promotes a business-value approach that values return on investment (ROI) and customer costs-savings over technical ease of execution. Provides coaching to allow architects to scale solutions. Support new customer opportunities in partnership with Sales with highly significant or global impacts for Microsoft, as needed.

Collaborates with the other managers to jointly drive project/technical governance of the design, build, and deployment into use of proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots. Provides end-to-end governance, oversight, and thought leadership within assigned account. Provides guidance to team in understanding and demonstrating business value (e.g., release of revenue, cost savings) that the business solution realizes.

Guides team in working with the business sponsor and customer/partner stakeholders (e.g., Business users, Enterprise Architects, Security Team, Operations Team) to gather and ratify requirements and constraints. Supports team in managing and resolving highly complex ambiguity in the requirements and constraints and documents assumptions and implications where it cannot be resolved. Ensures maintenance of the requirements/constraints traceability matrix to prove that solution components have a rationale/justification for inclusion in the architecture of the business solution. Oversees development and execution of test plans to prove that each requirement/constraint has been implemented as expected by the customer.

Leads team in collaborating to understand the business solution/problem. Drives agreement, based on the customer’s priorities, requirements/constraints, approach, principles, concepts, and expectations. Ensures team builds and documents a realistically costed, advanced/complex solution approach. Provides thought leadership on oversight and governance sets expectations for quality practices and standards to realize the business solution. Promotes a cohesive build methodology so the solution can be transitioned to live operations, leveraging solution expertise. Ensures communication of and adherence to the pre-sales value proposition. Ensures that customer opportunities, questions, and/or issues are brought to the appropriate internal teams. When appropriate, negotiates, collaborates on, reviews, and contributes to deal approval processes. Challenges deal construct to ensure Microsoft initiatives are incorporated appropriately. Communicates current view of delivery to customer executives on regular cadence, as needed. When appropriate, oversees a broad portfolio of accounts. Manages and ensures the all-up delivery of consulting engagements, as necessary. Innovates and implements long-term, strategic plans, in partnership with Sales to create new opportunities and sustainable growth for customer accounts across the portfolio, as needed. Ensures delivery team alignment and holds delivery team accountable for delivering on sales strategy.

Creates a culture and clarity around technical insights and escalations, and ensures broad sets of projects move forward. Provides support and guidance to team in identifying scenarios that could slow or impede pre-sales/delivery. Anticipates blockers and resolves escalations as needed and coaches team on good practices for handling escalations. Ensures that issues and blockers and addressed by the appropriate groups. Identifies widespread patterns in blockers across business areas or territories. Develops strategies to prevent blockers and issues in the future. When necessary, attends steering committee meetings with strategic customers to remove blockers and ensure delivery success. 

Works in close collaboration with the Project Manager and Account Team to anticipate, identify, categorize, and communicate business and technical risks. Defines risk mitigation activities that are foundational to the project plan. Defines risk contingency plans for invocation should the risk occur. Outlines methodology and governance principles and practices for the broader organization that allows others to minimize risks. 

Practice Development

Generates new and/or improvements to existing intellectual property. Anticipates and addresses organization- and industry-wide gaps, patterns, and needs to drive changes. Identifies which ideas should be culled, with consideration for scale across customers. Drives the re-use of intellectual property and recommends practices in both pre-sales and delivery. Leads and contributes to internal/external communities. 

Trusted Advisor 

Develops a deep network of internal/external relationships with senior-level decision makers at high-impact customers/partners to build influence in addressing problems/blockers and facilitating additional views on the matter of interest. Acts as an advisor to external stakeholders. Provides direction to facilitate relationships between others. Stays up to date on Microsoft’s technologies, products, and services in order to communicate Microsoft's mission, strategy, and capabilities. Provides guidance to others in doing so. When appropriate, develops a strategic relationship with key stakeholders within the customer portfolio, often as part of a steering committee, to ensure service delivery is on track and major issues are being anticipated, identified, and managed. 

Coaches team to use evidence-based arguments that articulate complex concepts in a simple manner to respectfully challenge Microsoft and customers/partners when a decision or course of action will not produce optimal results. Leverages strategic expertise to encourage alternative approaches where applicable. Leverages network and industry experience to connect customers/partners with ideas, people, and resources to support their success. Serves as the "technical conscience" to challenge the status quo and unrealistic expectations. Proactively resolves conflicts and seeks resolution to balance the overall outcome. Drives consensus where possible and leads decisions to resolve conflict when needed and guides team in doing so.

Drives awareness across all levels of the organization of partner challenges, industry trends, and competitor architectures to allow team members to engage with partners, demonstrate Microsoft's value, and develop counter strategy. Holds team accountable for leading the adoption of Microsoft technologies. 

Thought Leadership

Fosters community sharing of stories and leveraging of pre-existing resources by encouraging and empowering team to share learnings and by establishing a cadence (e.g., internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact the team at the corporate level. Holds teams across all organizational levels accountable for sharing insights with virtual team members, including C-level leaders, to inform the direction they take with customers/partners.

Initiates and drives external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons). Acts a mentor to less experienced colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Serves as an industry-leading expert and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences and publishing white papers around key technical topics and/or architecture design templates. 

Other

Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications 

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years' experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain (e.g., Security)) 

OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 10+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain (e.g., Security) 

OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications 

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 15+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain (e.g., Security) 

OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain (e.g., Security) 

OR equivalent experience. 

8+ years technical sales experience. 

8+ years project management experience. 

4+ years managing multiple, complex projects or portfolios. 

2+ years experience leading blended, multidisciplinary teams. 

5+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, and/or technical architect managers. 

Technical or Professional Certification in Domain (e.g., Security).

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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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.