Director Cloud Solution Architect

The Customer Success Unit brings together deep technical expertise and customer success leadership to help customers achieve meaningful business outcomes and realize value from their Microsoft investments. Data and AI sit at the center of every organization's transformation, and our customers are looking to Microsoft to help them modernize their data estates, unlock insights, and build secure, responsible, production-grade AI solutions.   As the Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) Manager – Data & AI, you will lead, coach, and develop a team of Cloud Solution Architects who help customers and partners design, deploy, and scale solutions across Microsoft's Data & AI portfolio — including Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Azure SQL and Cosmos DB, Power BI, Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry), Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, and agentic AI solutions. You will guide the team in translating customer business challenges into data and AI architectures, removing technical blockers, driving operational readiness, accelerating consumption and usage growth, and delivering solutions aligned with Microsoft methodologies and proven practices.   This opportunity will allow you to strengthen your people leadership, deepen your expertise in data platforms and AI, and help scale repeatable Data & AI patterns and best practices across a diverse portfolio of strategic customers.   Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Business Impact   Coaches the team on operating to required operational excellence and proven practice standards across all engagement stages, activities, and tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, consumption tracking, time tracking).   Leads the team in orchestrating across Microsoft account teams, specialists, partners, and customer teams to deliver on-strategy Data & AI outcomes and increase customer and partner satisfaction.   Oversees the team in anticipating and managing business and technical risks for data and AI workloads — including data quality, data governance, model performance, cost, and Responsible AI considerations — applying governance principles to identify , communicate, and minimize risk.   Leads the team in delivering solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., value-based deliverables [VBDs], architecture design sessions, technical validation, training), ensuring proven patterns are followed so customers are operationally ready to run data and AI workloads in production.   Coaches the team on guiding customers toward well-architected (secure, resilient, governed, AI-ready), cost- and performance-optimized data platforms and AI solutions that increase retention and expansion opportunities.   Drives the team to proactively identify cross-solution opportunities for Data & AI consumption, usage, and Unified expansion (including Enhanced Solutions) — such as data estate modernization, analytics migration to Microsoft Fabric, generative AI and agentic applications, and Copilot extensibility — based on clear business value to the customer.   Guides the team on articulating the value of Unified and partnering with account teams to build consumption plans aligned with the right Data & AI services. Leads feedback to the Unified Delivery team on Data & AI VBDs to refine and further develop content.   Leverages change management proven practices (or engages the change management team) to help customers drive long-term organizational adoption of data and AI solutions,