Job Description

Overview

We are hiring a Solution Engineer (“SE”) to help support our fastest growing AI-centric startups and software development company customers to build, optimize, and scale on Microsoft Azure. This role focuses on helping earn customer trust in technical decisions by connecting our customers’ products and business outcomes to practical cloud, AI, data, and application architectures, then proving those architectures through demos, workshops, pilots, and production-readiness plans.

This requires work across account teams, specialists, partners, customer success teams, and engineering and product groups to unblock adoption, accelerate opportunities and turn customer ambition into measurable Azure usage, revenue, and long-term platform commitment. This role requires both technical depth and commercial judgement. The SE must influence and support senior technical leaders in our customer accounts to remove blockers, qualify technical risk, create repeatable patterns, and help progress opportunities across regions.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy for assigned customers across the customer adoption journey from discovery through technical to close, MVP, pilot, and production adoption and scaling phases.
• Lead architecture-led customer conversations across Azure AI, application innovation, data platforms, developer tools, cloud operations, governance, and security topics.
• Design credible end-to-end solutions using services and technology including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, AI agents, Azure Kubernetes Service, containers, serverless, APIs, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Power BI, and GitHub.
• Deliver demos, whiteboarding sessions, architecture workshops, proof of concepts, and technical validations that demonstrate clear business value and a sensible path to production for customers.
• Translate customer product goals, business priorities, and technical complexity into decision criteria, success plans, implementation roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
• Identify and remove technical blockers including architecture gaps, security concerns, capacity and quota constraints, migration risks, integration challenges, and operational readiness issues.
• Partner with account executives, specialists, and customer success teams to support pipeline creation, opportunity progression, technical win documentation, milestone hygiene, and forecast quality.
• Differentiate Microsoft against competitors by positioning Azure as a trusted, secure, scalable, and integrated platform for AI-native software companies.
• Capture reusable patterns, lessons learned, field feedback, and customer insights so we can scale our business consistently across the globe.
• Customer scenarios this role will support AI-native application development: agents, copilots, RAG, evaluation, model selection, observability, responsible AI, inference optimization, and production AI operations. Cloud-native platform scaling: high-growth infrastructure, reliability, performance, capacity, quota, networking, observability, and global scale. Data-driven modernization: database migration, analytics modernization, AI-ready data foundations, governance, cataloging and data integration. SMB and software company growth: SaaS architecture, multi-tenant platforms, marketplace readiness, co-sell motions, developer productivity, and product-led growth.
• Technical acceleration: workshops, hackathons, migration programs, partner-led scale motions, and repeatable delivery playbooks.

Qualifications

• Experience in technical pre-sales, solution engineering, cloud architecture, software engineering, technical consulting, or an equivalent customer-facing technical role.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical and business stakeholders, including CTOs, founders, engineering leaders, architects, and product leaders.
• Hands-on understanding of cloud architecture and modern application design, including security, reliability, scalability, integration, and operations.
• Practical experience with AI, data, analytics, application modernization or developer platform solutions on Azure or comparable cloud platforms.
• Experience creating demos, prototypes, POCs, pilots or MVPs that lead to technical decisions and production adoption.
• Strong communication, storytelling, and collaboration skills; ability to drive consensus without direct authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Depth in one or more of: Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, agentic systems, RAG, Azure Kubernetes Service, containers, serverless, API platforms, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Power BI or GitHub.
• Experience working with startups, SMBs, SaaS, marketplace, venture-backed or product-led-growth customer scenarios.
• Understanding of AI governance, Responsible AI, security, compliance, model evaluation, observability, cost management, and FinOps.
• Ability to support technical sales motions across complex territories, multiple stakeholders, and fast-moving customer priorities.
• Experience with competitive positioning and objection handling in AI, cloud platform, data, or developer tool markets.
• Spoken and written Mandarin fluency is a nice-to-have but not strictly required.

What good looks like

• Customer obsessed: earns trust with senior technical leaders by combining curiosity, clarity, and practical technical depth.
• Hands-on and credible: can whiteboard, demo, prototype, and pressure-test an architecture rather than simply presenting slides.
• Commercially aware: connects technical decisions to pipeline, consumption, revenue, growth, risk reduction, and customer outcomes.
• Operationally disciplined: maintains clear milestones, blockers, next steps, technical win evidence, and repeatable account motions.
• Globally collaborative: works effectively across time zones, regions, partners, and internal specialist teams.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: thrives in fast-moving environments where customer priorities, architectures, and business models evolve quickly.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.