Digital transformation is impacting every industry around the world. From retail and manufacturing to financial services and healthcare, disruption is already here. Customers across all Industries are asking Microsoft to help them reinvent their business, innovate, and digitally transform to todays new realities.The Retail Industry Team, part of the Worldwide Enterprise Commercial Organization, is accountable for leveraging deep industry and technical expertise to deliver relevant, customized industry solutions and services, built on a secure, integrated cloud platform, to empower our customers to digitally transform their businesses. Its no longer just about one simple software solution; its about creating a connected, secure, efficient, and scalable digital ecosystem.We are at one of the most pivotal times in the Retail & Healthcare industry. New levels of connectivity and intelligence, enabled by cloud computing, IoT and AI have elevated companies to unprecedented levels of transformation, productivity and efficiency. As we embrace a rich future of digital empowerment, we are looking for senior level hands-on technical **Architects** to join the Retail Industry team to help in this transformation for our one of our largest Retail customers.Our team culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. We also strive to have fun!If you have a passion for customer success and want to be part of creating life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world, we want to hear from you.**Responsibilities**Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and services. In this senior hands-on technical architect role you will help lead a comprehensive digital transformation for a global strategic customer in the Chicago area. As one of the program leaders, this exciting role will help fuel the Customers success through Azure adoption,retention, and growth. Some of the core responsibilities for this role are:+ Lead client engagements from definition through delivery to ensure technical transformation success for our customers.+ Collaborate with enterprise customers to scope and define requirements, architect and design solutions, develop, and deliver transformational, customized industry solutions and services.+ Ensure all solutions exhibit high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment+ Develop deep relationships with key customer decision makers (both Business and IT) who drive long-term innovation and transformation to our customers product roadmap.+ Be a Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering team to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.+ Proactively identify opportunities for integrating modern architecture patterns and emerging technical solutions into the current design+ Evaluate, identify, mitigate and eliminate risk, provide guidance, and propose immediate solutions+ Comfortable and effective communicator with all stakeholders, including senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, Developers, Data Scientists,and IT Management+ Lead deep technical architecture discussions and development of POCs+ Work with multiple customers to createProof of concepts (POCs) / MinimumViable Products (MVPs) etc. and guide customers to production deployment and operationalization.+ Apply technical knowledge and expertise to architect and design solutions that meet business and IT needs, create solution roadmaps, drive POCs and MVPs, and ensure long term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key technologies where appropriate+ Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects and technology stakeholders to develop complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions.+ Createexceptional cross-team collaboration and communication. Partner with all required Microsoft stakeholdersand partnersto drive role clarity, account coverage, project assignment and effective cross-team collaboration+ Ensure delivery of high-quality production deployments that are resilient and successful+ Coach and enable your team members to accelerate digital transformation program to production, including guidance on architectural design, technical recommendations, blocker escalations, and technical resource orchestration.**Qualifications****Required Qualifications:**At least 8 years of experience ideating, architecting, consulting, designing, developing, leading, and delivering cloud infrastructure and application platform technology solutions over the entire lifecycle of client-facing large scale, complex enterprise projectsAt least 5 years of experience in at least **one** of the following technical domains:**Core Infrastructure**+ Modelling cloud infrastructure based on application scale and capacity needs, providing data-driven recommendations to optimize application architecture and performance+ Use of architectural patterns and anti-patterns for resiliency and geo-availability+ Cloud networking and hybrid connectivity with expertise in BGP and SD-WAN solutions as well as Azure networking services such as Express Route+ Management, monitoringandoperations at-scale, preferably in a cloud environment+ Identity and access control with experience administering B2B and B2C applications as well as a working knowledge of Azure AD+ Security and governance with a strong proficiency in defining and modelling security baselines and managing security posture+ Infrastructure-as-Code to build, test and deploy infrastructure for application environments+ Running microservices and container-based workloads in production.+ Open source technologies and frameworks**Security**+ Hands-on experience with the Microsoft Identity Platform (AADP, Conditional Access, Privilege Identity Management, etc.) and/or securely architecting and deploying Azure workloads+ Hands-on experience in security investigations, threat detection & analysis, security program management, and/or incident response.+ Strong working knowledge of security controls such as encryption, AuthN/AuthZ, PKI, HIDS, NIDS, etc.+ Proficient with AAD B2B and AAD B2C+ Modern security related technologies such as threat hunting and modeling, digital forensics, reverse engineering, phishing, and penetration testing.+ Zero Trust Framework principles+ Technically proficient with any of the following: Active Directory, ADFS, SSO configuration, Azure Identity protection, Identity Management, O365 Identity, Azure MFA.+ Experience supporting large and complex geographically distributed enterprise environments with 10000+ users+ Experience in Windows System Administration, Certificates, PKI, DNS, Networking, Virtualization, PowerShell scripting.+ OS Internals concepts, load balancing, geo-redundancy, CDN and VPN technologies.**Microservices**+ Comprehensive expertise in microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes+ Proficient with streaming workloads and Lambda architectures using Azure Stream Analytics, IoT/Event Hubs, Service Bus, Spark streaming, Kafka, , Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and Azure Data Factory.+ Software architecture, data structures, modern design patterns, and network protocols+ Source control experience including branching, merging and rebasing+ Running microservices and container-based workloads in production.**Application Development**+ Engineering distributed applications within architectural scenarios such as Web and IoT+ Programming languages such as C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Node.js, JSON, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, Pig/Hive (one or more)+ Designing scalable solutions on cloud platforms with focus on performance and resiliency, utilizing microservices architectures+ Application design patterns, and anti-patterns, such as MVC, CQRS and/or SAGA+ Interacting with and querying databases and/or NoSQL datastores+ Application monitoring and end to end telemetry+ Containers for packaging application deployment units and interacting with container-orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, Service Fabric, Cloud Foundry+ Defining CI/CD pipelines to automate test and release across different application environments using concepts such as Blue/Green and Canary deployments and related technologies (e.g. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure for DevOps, Chef, Puppet)+ Source code management using Git or other source control technologies such as TFS+ Open source technologies and frameworks**Dynamics**+ Deep technical skill on business application platform, technical components of the Dynamics 365 platform, and significant experience in the relevant practice area and technology focus.+ Experience in Dynamics 365 with deep specialization with Customer Insights (CI)+ Related experience in technology solutions development, Cloud / Business Applications technologies.+ Knowledge and technical proficiency in adjacent technologies including the following: Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Azure, Azure Logic Apps, Flow, SQL, AD, etc. (certifications a plus).+ Extensive hands-on expertise with Common Data model+ Experience with alternative/Competing technology stacks such as SFDC, AppSheets, and SAP**Power Platform**+ Experience with Microsoft Power Platform, especially Power Apps and Power Automate.+ Application architecture and development experience+ Knowledge and technical proficiency in adjacent technologies including the following: Power BI, Microsoft Azure, Azure Logic Apps, Flow, SQL, AD, etc. (certifications a plus).+ Extensive hands-on expertise with Common Data model+ Extensive experienced in implementing, operating, customizing, tuning and troubleshooting Power Platform solutions.**Data and Analytics**+ SQL Server migration, OSS relational DB migration+ Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB+ Azure Cosmos DB, database scalability and availability+ Big Data structured and unstructured data including SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Synapse, Redshift and data lake concepts.+ Advanced Analytics including Azure Databricks/Spark+ Visualization tools such as PowerBI, Tableau and Qlik+ Data Governance, logging and lineage+ Data Science deployment process and frameworks including Pandas, TensorFlow.+ Machine Learning including Azure ML, ML Server, and Azure Databricks+ Artificial Intelligence including Bot framework, Cognitive Services+ Streaming workloads and Lambda architectures using Azure Stream Analytics, IoT/Event Hubs, Service Bus, Spark streaming, Kafka streams and Storm.**Other Qualifications**+ Inclusive and collaborative driving teamwork and cross-team alignment.+ Strong partner relationship management and solution development skills.+ Conversant knowledge of competing platforms and solutions.+ Proven track record of building deep relationships with CXOs+ Strong executive presence including communication and presentation skills with a high degree of comfort to large and small technical audiences.+ Problem solving mentality leveraging internal and/or external resources, conflict resolution, and follow through with partners.+ Orchestration of application development lifecycle.+ Experience in vertical industries, proven by projects/solutions implemented with substantial business processes covering Financial and Insurance, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Retail, or other business to consumer industry scenarios.+ Demonstrable architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of complex application architectures+ Candidates must also demonstrate ability to adapt to new technologies, learn quickly, and understand relevant cloud trends is required.+ Travel: Availability to travel is an integral part of this job once Covid restrictions are released and could be 25 to 50% at times for this role as Lead Azure Architect. Expected to work on-site with the customer in Chicago and engage with Microsoft Engineering team members in Redmond, WA.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. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/accommodationrequest) .Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.