Overview
Microsoft Industry Solutions – Global Center Innovation and Delivery Center (GCID) delivers end-to-end solutions by enabling accelerated adoption and productive use of Microsoft technologies. An organization of well over 1000+ exceptional people, GCID presents a significant opportunity for highly experienced services professionals to shape enterprise transformation at scale.
The Principal Architect is a senior executive level technical leader accountable for enterprise-wide architecture strategy, AI first delivery execution, and business outcomes across complex, multiyear customer engagements. This role serves as a trusted advisor to CEO, CIO, CTO, CDO, and executive leadership teams of customers, influencing digital, data, and AI transformation agendas.
In an AI first GCID organization, Principal Architects are expected to shape vision, define guardrails, and lead execution of intelligent, scalable, and secure solutions that directly drive business value, resilience, and innovation. The ideal candidate demonstrates exceptional technical breadth, strategic depth, executive presence, and the ability to operate confidently in ambiguous, high impact environments.
Responsibilities
AI First Delivery Leadership
Lead end-to-end technical accountability for mission critical, multiprogram engagements, ensuring strategic alignment, architectural integrity, and measurable business outcomes.
Act as the executive technical authority during escalations, guiding recovery, transformation, or exit strategies for high-risk or underperforming engagements.
Partner with CIO/CTO/CDO leadership to balance innovation, governance, cost, security, and speed at enterprise scale.
Set enterprise architecture standards and technical guardrails across data, AI, platform, and engineering disciplines.
Ensure production grade quality through architecture reviews, performance benchmarks, security controls, observability, and operational readiness.
Champion modern engineering practices including DevSecOps, platform engineering, CI/CD, SRE, and AI assisted development.
Innovation & Thought Leadership
Shape forward-looking architecture visions for customers, leveraging emerging AI, data, and platform capabilities.
Lead creation of reusable assets, reference architectures, accelerators, and IP that scale across customers and industries.
Client Engagement & Solutioning
Guide customers through complex tradeoffs involving cost, risk, performance, compliance, and speed to value.
Team Management & Mentorship
Ensure all solutions meet enterprise security, compliance, reliability, and Responsible AI standards.
Qualifications
Enterprise Data Architecture & Modern Platforms
Data Engineering & Large Scale Data Processing
Database Platforms, Performance & Capacity Engineering
AI First Data Engineering & Unify Your Data
AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement
Ensure AI systems meet executive expectations for trust, transparency, performance, and value realization.
Solutioning, Presales & Technical Leadership
Frontier Consulting Skills
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.
