Partner Solution Architect

Microsoft's partner ecosystem is constantly evolving, with a focus on driving growth and profitability for Microsoft and our partners and successful business outcomes for customers. Microsoft makes significant investments into our partner ecosystem to ensure that we have a world class ecosystem partnering with us to drive mutual customer success. Now, more than ever, our partners are critical to our ability to help our customers transform leveraging the power of AI.

Microsoft Enterprise Partner Sales (EPS) is the commercial organization accountable for driving Microsoft's growth and success for Enterprise customers through our partner ecosystem. We define and execute our global partner ecosystem strategy, focused on the end-to-end partner lifecycle, such that together we can deliver our customers digital transformation goals.

As a Partner Solutions Architect, we are looking for you to bring your work ethic, enthusiasm, optimism, and passion to foster profound growth and change within our partner ecosystem. You will leverage your challenger mindset, technology industry knowledge, market insights, understanding of the competitive landscape, and best in class interpersonal skills to grow our robust ecosystem of world class partners enabling them to bring market-defining solutions to our customers.

As a Partner Solution Architect (PSA), you will serve as the deep technical SME to a partners' technical teams, collaborating on product strategy plans, helping shape integrations and scaling with Microsoft Cloud and Commercial Marketplace. The core responsibilities are:

• Guide Solution Development & Activation - You'll lead the development and activation of new or enhanced partner offerings and products that align with Microsoft Cloud priorities. Your focus will be ensuring these solutions are robust, scalable, secure, and tailored to meet evolving customer needs.
• Empower Innovation - You'll run technical innovation workshops, tech briefings, and envisioning sessions to build technical intensity across partner teams. By collaborating with engineering and product teams, you'll help accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies and shape partner offerings that align with both business goals and technical requirements.
• Strategic Sales Enablement - You'll play a key role in activating transformational deals by providing architectural guidance, resolving technical blockers, and enhancing solution design. Your work will directly contribute to workload consumption and revenue impact.
• Champion Technical Excellence - You'll guide partners through architecture design sessions, proof-of-concepts, and MVP builds. You'll ensure that solutions follow Microsoft's Cloud and AI best practices and are optimized for performance, scalability, and security.
• Thought Leadership & Stakeholder Management - you'll build long-term engagements with strategic partners, influencing their adoption of Microsoft technologies. You'll develop deep technical relationships with CXOs and foster executive alignment to support joint success.
• Partner Enablement & Business Acumen - You'll coach broader partner technical teams to ensure pre-sales, deployment, and consumption are embedded in solution development. You'll help partners build resilience to technical challenges, navigate competitive landscapes, and translate technical concepts into business value.

Partner Centricity

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders (to the extent that the customer/partner will call for consultation without being prompted).
• Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer/partner business, complex technical requirements and issues (e.g., involving great length or tenacity to resolve), and various technical strategies being proposed.
• Addresses requirements/issues/strategies with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Acts as the voice of the partner by driving new feedback, insights, and resources across territories to add and prioritize.
• Identifies and directs attention to multiple, strategic opportunities (e.g., launch deals) that align with revenue goals, and orchestrates growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners.
• Leads assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific, complex opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.
• Understands and anticipates solution area-specific market opportunities (e.g., competitor insights) and proactively leads initiatives to address them by supporting, assembling, and leading a v-team.
• Influences, challenges, and supports partners in developing scalable offerings, practices, products, and solutions, and investing and adopting new technologies at scale of the customer.
• Maintains active visibility in solution area-specific communities both to build credibility in internal/partner work and information sharing (e.g., technical updates, public facing roadmap) and to influence partners.
• Collaborates with internal stakeholders (e.g., engineering, sales) to provide field-based insights related to products/solutions related to functioning, pricing, implementation, and other areas.

Technical Leadership

• Leads and may assemble virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape.
• Demonstrates industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings across internal teams.
• Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers/partner. Drives consumption acceleration, as well as IP reuse and best practice sharing. Develops and contributes to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies.
• Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance), and leveraging business experience to prioritize efforts.

Required/minimum qualifications

• 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 master's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 3+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, product development, or related
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Proven experience in cloud architecture, solution design, and partner enablement, particularly in large-scale or global engagements
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical innovation workshops, architecture reviews, and build-to-consume engagements with partners
• 6-10+ years of related experience in technology IP solutions or services development, with a deep understanding of digital transformation business drivers, cloud platforms, and emerging cloud trends like generative AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) and SaaS (Software as a Service) services.
  • Strong background and in-depth knowledge of cloud technologies, with a focus on Microsoft's cloud offerings (Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365)
  • Minimum L300 knowledge of Kubernetes
  • Minimum L300 knowledge of DevOps and GitHub as a developer platform
  • Minimum L300 knowledge in application development with AI services

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 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
• 4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external)
• 4+ years experience working on technical projects
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications)

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.