3 days ago
Redmond, WA, USA or Mountain View, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$166k - $331k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the ITP architecture guild, including its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms.
- Define architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technologies, and guardrails.
- Drive AI adoption through AI-first architectures, patterns, and guardrails for agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI.
- Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, product, and engineering organizations.
- Run architecture reviews and lead reviews of consequential products and programs, documenting decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and alternatives.
- Guide logical and physical architectures covering services, data, APIs, identity, security boundaries, deployment, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, and operations.
- Develop pro-code golden paths and instrumented developer loops spanning coding, review, testing, deployment, monitoring, and feedback.
- Mentor engineers and architects, conduct design and code reviews, and raise architectural capability across the organization.
- Prototype and validate high-risk engineering solutions using working prototypes, benchmarks, modeling, simulations, and technical spikes.
- Create reference implementations, templates, sample code, target-state architectures, and incremental transition roadmaps.
- Evaluate architecture health using telemetry, capacity and cost models, reliability data, security findings, incidents, and customer feedback.
- Communicate architecture decisions to engineering, business, executive, customer, and partner audiences and contribute technical thought leadership.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
- Hands-on experience defining logical and physical architectures for large-scale, business-critical enterprise products, platforms, cloud services, or distributed systems.
- Experience defining future-state architectures and delivering multi-year transformation or modernization roadmaps across teams or organizational boundaries.
- Experience establishing architecture principles, design standards, reference architectures, patterns, guardrails, decision records, and technical review practices.
- Deep understanding of software and distributed-systems design, including service boundaries, APIs, integration patterns, data architecture, identity, networking, deployment topology, resiliency, observability, and operational supportability.
- Experience translating business and technical requirements into implementable architecture specifications, diagrams, decisions, and delivery plans.
- Experience leading and influencing senior technical and business stakeholders without formal reporting authority.
- Hands-on experience validating designs through prototypes, implementation reviews, code reviews, benchmarks, modeling, or direct engineering and operations work.
- Experience applying AI-first development practices such as AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, AI-driven testing, and code review.
- Deep expertise in one or more areas including cloud platform architecture, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, AI systems, security architecture, networking, developer platforms, or large-scale service engineering.
- Experience modernizing mature or legacy environments through transition architectures, domain decomposition, interface evolution, data migration, and incremental replacement.
- Experience with architecture methods or frameworks such as the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, TOGAF, domain-driven design, or threat modeling.
- Familiarity with Azure, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.
- Experience designing platforms spanning multiple clouds, regions, regulatory boundaries, partner ecosystems, or heterogeneous technology environments.
- Experience with cloud-native and AI-era architecture patterns, including container orchestration, event-driven systems, API platforms, data and model governance, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and Responsible AI controls.
- Experience building architecture maturity models, conformance measures, quality scorecards, automated policy validation, and adoption metrics.
- Experience building and leading an architecture guild, review board, or similar community of practice.
- Experience defining a pro-code golden path and instrumented developer loop involving platform engineering, templates, scaffolding, CI/CD, AI-assisted development, and developer-experience measurement.
- Track record of mentoring software engineers and prototyping solutions to difficult engineering problems under production-relevant conditions.
- A master’s degree with 12+ years of experience, or a bachelor’s degree with 15+ years of experience, is preferred; relevant architecture or cloud certifications are beneficial but do not replace demonstrated judgment and delivery impact.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Benefits
- The typical U.S. base pay range is $165,600–$296,400 per year, with a separate higher range for specified San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area locations.
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
- This position is open for at least five days and accepts applications on an ongoing basis until filled.
About Microsoft
Microsoft develops operating systems, productivity software, cloud services, developer tools, and consumer devices for individuals, enterprises, and governments. Its main products include Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, Visual Studio/GitHub, Xbox, and LinkedIn; revenue comes from software subscriptions and licenses, cloud consumption, hardware sales, and advertising. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is a public company traded on Nasdaq.