The Cloud Solution Architect Director – AI Business Solutions leads a team supporting U.S. Financial Services enterprise customers across banking, capital markets, and insurance. This role ensures the team acts as the voice of the customer and partner, using industry knowledge, customer insights, and demand signals to translate business priorities into solutions that drive agentic AI adoption, cowork experiences, usage, consumption, and measurable customer value. The manager coaches the team to deliver a seamless customer experience, anticipate and remove adoption blockers, and prepare complex customers for operational readiness and long-term success. The role also guides the team in identifying cross-solution growth opportunities, applying company methodologies and operational excellence standards, and leading virtual teams that bring together the right resources to accelerate outcomes at scale. In addition, the manager is accountable for employee growth and development, project execution, and performance management.
Responsibilities
Customer Centricity
Be the Voice Of the customer: Leads team on proactively acting as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and/or internal communities
Be the Trusted Advisor: Leads team in identifying customer/partner challenges and aligning business applications or business process-oriented solutions with Microsoft’s product strategy and customer ROI, relative to competitive offerings. Coaches on building relationships with technical and business decision makers. Leads and elevates interactions with C-suite roles to address security, compliance, and risk needs, involving experts as needed.
Deliver Customer Satisfaction: Drives team to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience.
Delivers Business Impact
Drive Consumption/Usage through Unified Support Plans: Leads team to deliver solutions using company methodologies and proven practices/patterns to support complex customer readiness and goals. Coaches team to apply change management to drive adoption, customer satisfaction and consumption/usage. Coaches team to design well architected solutions to boost retention & growth.
Resolve blockers with urgency: Drives team to anticipate, identify, escalate and mitigate blockers to accelerate solution deployment and usage. Coaches team on applying broad business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.
Identify opportunities: Drives team to identify and anticipate new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale by communicating a clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Leads team to capture opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.
Execute with Operational Excellence & Agility: Leads team to operate according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record.
Technical Leadership
Focus on Continuous Upskilling & Improvement: Leads team to identify and communicate delivery gaps, linking patterns across business and tech to improve products, IP, and processes for scalable solutions. Leads team to contribute to Microsoft’s frameworks and methodologies. Leads team on developing local thought leadership and innovation.
Engage in Communities: Leads team to drive v-teams, share strategic insights across Microsoft, and apply architectural knowledge in a competitive context. Leads industry engagement through presentations and events to elevate Microsoft’s presence. Leads team to contribute to IP, especially in emerging areas like AI, and to build scalable models. Leads team to participate in external communities, sharing learnings internally.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
Other Requirements
This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.
Cloud Solution Architecture M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 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 $165,600 - $272,300 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.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- 8+ years of experience in cloud or infrastructure technologies, IT consulting or support, systems administration, network operations, software development or support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, or consulting
- 3+ years of people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, or technical architect managers
- 12+ years of relevant experience with a bachelor's degree, or master's degree plus 8+ years of relevant experience
- 6+ years of experience in a customer-facing role
- 6+ years of experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions
- Technical certification in cloud, such as Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or security certifications
- 5+ years of people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, or technical architect managers
- Authorization to work in the United States without current or future employer visa sponsorship
Microsoft Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Microsoft and has not been reviewed or approved by Microsoft.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is presented as broadly competitive overall, with clear role/level/location variation and an emphasis on using posted ranges and band information for apples-to-apples comparisons.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are described as a standout, highlighted by a strong 401(k) match structure and immediate vesting, plus additional plan features for tax-advantaged saving.
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Parental & Family Support — Family-oriented benefits are portrayed as a meaningful strength, with substantial paid parental leave and added supports like back-up care and adoption/surrogacy assistance.
Microsoft Insights
What We Do
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.
