Cloud Solution Architect - Data & AI at Microsoft

The candidate is expected to support Africa Transformation Office (ATO), which is established to transform Africa to a Cloud-first, Digital-first continent enabling a thriving digital economy across Africa. Africa Transformation Office (ATO) is chartered to build strategic partnerships with key governments, institutions and enterprises to enable and accelerate digital economy across the African continent and develop digital marketing engines to enable and accelerate Startups and SMBs as well.

Key Responsibilities:

• Understand customers’ overall data estate Business and IT priorities and success measures to design Data & Analytics solutions that drive business value.​
• Apply technical knowledge to architect and design solutions that meet business and IT needs, create Data & Analytics roadmaps, drive POCs and MVPs, and ensure long term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate.
• Ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment
• Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering team to remove key blockers and drive product improvements
• Maintain technical skills and knowledge, keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the Data & Analytics technical community while educating customers on Azure platform

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

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

Additional or Preferred Qualifications :

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 6+ years of experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
• 8+ years of experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external)
• 8+ years of experience working on technical projects

Technical ​Qualifications:

• Deep domain expertise in one of the Data-specific areas, such as Azure SQL Data (IaaS/PaaS), deployments and migrations to the cloud, Open-source database deployments and migrations, Cloud Scale Analytics, Data Governance, etc. OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.
• Experience creating Data & Analytics Proof of Concepts (PoC), Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers ​that lead to production deployments
• The technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies and understand market and relevant cloud trends​.
• Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of key Data & Analytics platforms such as AWS, GCP, Snowflake, etc.
• Partners: Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e., Jenkins, Azure Developer Services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e., Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub).

Professional Qualification:

• Relationship Building: Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior executives. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. The ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.
• Good understanding of key Data & Analytics scenarios that are driving digital transformation in key industries such as financial services, Retail, Healthcare etc. ​
• Problem Solving: Ability to solve customer’s Analytics problems through various cloud technologies
• Collaboration and Communication: Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, ability to communicate Analytics concepts effectively with business, data engineers/analysts and technical audiences, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT Management, Data Analysts, Engineers)