Cloud Solution Architect - AI & Apps (Strategic Accounts)

We are looking for a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) who is passionate about driving our customers' application innovation & AI transformation on the Microsoft platform. As part of this role, you will guide customers through their AI adoption journey, helping them design, build, and scale solutions using Azure, GitHub, and Microsoft's AI stack. You'll be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within some of our strategic UK customers. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and operations with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges. You will work with customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions and engage with senior customer executives, enterprise architects, platform engineers and developers. You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, ensuring technical blockers are removed on adoption. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home., * Understand customers' overall Business and IT priorities and success measures for platform engineering, building cloud applications, AI adoption and Low code opportunities.

• Act as the voice of the customer by driving new feedback into engineering, insights on usage and application patterns and help accelerate solution delivery through Architectural Reviews, Proof of Concepts/MVP applications and environment setup.
• Support customer skilling by making skilling recommendations or delivering technical discussions, workshops and other cloud readiness activities and ensure that solution exhibits performance, security, scalability, maintainability and reliability upon deployment.
• Consumption (Cloud & Support) growth - Develop opportunities to drive Customer Success business results & help Customers get value from their Microsoft investments and identify resolutions to Customer blockers by leveraging subject matter expertise and use internal Microsoft processes for escalations to support and engineering.
• Drive customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementation and proactively use knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs.
• Learn new technologies or services that are aligned to customer needs and common patterns seen in Cloud application development and stay current with the latest Azure, AI and GitHub capabilities, cloud application patterns and be a practitioner of one or more enterprise languages .Net, Python, Java, JavaScript/Node.js, etc. and related frameworks.
• Share ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams and internal communities as well as participate in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and generate new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners so as to drive opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing and consumption acceleration., + Azure AI Foundry (Models, Agent Service, Semantic Kernel, Search, ML, SDK)

• AppPlat/Containers/Serverless (App Service, AKS, ACA, ARO, Functions)
• DevOps (CI/CD, Azure DevOps, DevSecOps)
• GitHub (Copilot, Enterprise, Adv Security, Actions, Codespaces)

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

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 4+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting

• OR equivalent experience

This role requires UK Security Clearance, therefore candidates will need to either have existing security clearance or meet the minimum criteria to apply for security clearance. Preferred Qualifications (PQs)

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting

• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting

• OR equivalent experience

Strong years of experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).

Strong years of experience working on technical projects

Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications)

Microsoft is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We develop, license, and support a wide range of software products, services, and devices that help individuals and businesses realize their full potential.

Our flagship products include the Microsoft 365 productivity cloud, Windows operating system, Azure cloud platform, and Dynamics 365 business applications. We are also a leader in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, developer tools, and gaming through Xbox and Game Pass.

With operations in more than 190 countries and over 220,000 employees worldwide, Microsoft is committed to responsible innovation, inclusive economic growth, and sustainability. We work closely with governments, industries, and communities to ensure that technology serves the public good and helps address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2025, we continue to look forward—investing in AI, cloud, and quantum computing to shape the future of work, education, and society at large scale.