Job Description
Azure Solution Architect - Microsoft Practice (Remote, US)
📍 Location: United States, Remote
💰 Compensation: $175,000 – $215,000 base + performance-linked variable
📅 Contract: Permanent, Full-Time
🛂 Visa Sponsorship: Not available. Must have US Citizenship or a Green Card.
🏢 Reports to: Microsoft Practice Lead
⚖️ Split: 50% pre-sales, 50% delivery
About the Opportunity
Our client is a Microsoft-focused technology consultancy delivering cloud, data, AI, and automation solutions to enterprise clients across North America and Europe. They are hiring an Azure Solutions Architect to lead the technical side of their US Microsoft practice.
This is a client-facing role. You will be in front of prospects and customers most weeks. Half your time goes on pre-sales (solution design, proposals, estimating, pitches). The other half is delivery leadership (architecture ownership, quality bar, escalations). Microsoft alliance work runs through both.
Azure is the priority. The Microsoft go-to-market rests on three pillars, and this role answers for the first: Azure, Fabric, and the AI and data layer.
Your pay is tied to how much you grow the practice - you get credit for work won as well as work delivered.
What You’ll Do
Pre-Sales (50%)
- Lead solution design on live pursuits; turn client needs into defensible Microsoft architectures.
- Write and own technical content for proposals, SOWs, and RFPs.
- Estimate scope, effort, and commercial risk - and defend those estimates.
- Be the senior technical voice in pitches, briefings, and bake-offs.
- Run discovery workshops and architecture reviews that convert to paid engagements.
- Productise offerings: turn a one-off pattern into a repeatable scope, price, reference architecture, demo, and estimating model.
Delivery Leadership (50%)
- Own architecture for US Microsoft engagements from design authority to production.
- Set technical quality standards; review output; hold the line on governance and security.
- Resolve escalations on live accounts and protect client relationships.
- Turn delivered work into references and case studies.
- Mentor consultants and support practice skilling.
Microsoft Alliance (Through Both)
- Build relationships with Microsoft field: PDMs, AEs, CSAs, technology specialists.
- Support co-sell motions, joint account planning, and Microsoft-sourced pipeline.
- Lead funded pre-sales on Azure: assessments, proofs of value, migration/modernisation plans. Produce workload assessments, target architectures, and Azure consumption estimates.
- Represent the company at Microsoft field briefings, partner events, and joint workshops.
What We’re Looking For
Required
- Certification: Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (or current successor). Must provide a shareable Credly badge or Microsoft Learn transcript link when applying. No link = no consideration. No certification = no move forward.
- 10+ years in Microsoft-stack consulting or solution architecture, with 3+ years in pre-sales/bid/solutioning at a Microsoft partner, SI, or consultancy.
- Deep Azure at enterprise scale: landing zones, identity, networking, security, cost management.
- Hands-on Microsoft Fabric or comparable enterprise data platform, including capacity and licensing models.
- Azure AI: designing solutions on Microsoft Foundry or Azure OpenAI (retrieval, service selection, quota/cost, evaluation, responsible AI).
- Can explain the Copilot Studio vs. Foundry boundary and its licensing/governance/flexibility trade-offs.
- Commercial track record: proposals written, deals closed, pitches led. We will ask for specifics.
- Comfortable sizing and pricing work, and accountable for estimates.
- Experience working with Microsoft field teams and understanding partner funding/co-sell approvals.
- Credible with a CIO in the morning and a developer in the afternoon.
- Experience taking a cloud, data, or agent estate from pilot to governed scale.
- Excellent English communication (written and verbal).
- US work authorization required at application. No visa sponsorship.
Nice to Have
- Depth in Power Platform or Copilot Studio.
- Additional certifications (Cybersecurity Architect Expert, Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate, Fabric Data Engineer/Analytics Engineer Associate, Azure Database Administrator Associate, Power Platform Developer Associate).
- Integration across legacy/cloud estates, including Dynamics 365.
- Fabric adjacency: Databricks coexistence, Purview governance, Synapse-to-Fabric migration.
- Agent engineering: Microsoft Agent Framework, MCP tool integration, agent evaluation/observability.
- Healthcare or Financial Services industry experience.
- Exposure to UiPath, ServiceNow, or other model providers.
- Practice-building experience.
Why Join?
- Work at the intersection of AI and Microsoft - production solutions, not lab experiments.
- Greenfield practice growth: help build the Azure pillar in the US with direct credit for wins and delivery.
- Client-facing seniority: shape solutions and influence commercial growth.
- Microsoft alliance at the centre: field relationships turn into pipeline and references.
- Accelerated career path with global scaling.
- Compensation tied to practice growth, not delivery utilization.
If you’re an elite Azure Solutions Architect passionate about Microsoft cloud, Agentic AI, and building a practice from the ground up - and you’re ready to work alongside the best in the industry - I’d love to hear from you.
Apply now or reach out for a confidential chat.