Principal Architect

Job d:

Location:

United States, California, Mountain View Salary: USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year

Employment type:

Full-Time Work site: 3 days / week in-office

Role type:
Individual Contributor Travel: 25-50%
Profession:
Software Engineering Discipline:
Software Engineering Company:
Microsoft Overview At  Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP), we build and continually reinvent the technology behind Microsoft's Customer Service & Support (CSS) and Customer Success Unit (CSU) businesses. We sit inside the Office of the CTO (OCTO), part of MCAPS-Core, where product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners come together around one goal: accelerating customer outcomes and business growth.

OCTO shapes where Microsoft invests in emerging technology, sets technical direction, and leads the company's highest-priority AI initiatives, with impact reaching across Microsoft, industry, and society. Engineering carries that mission into the technology behind customer support and success, working alongside ITP's strategy, delivery, and productivity teams, and organized around three pillars of its own:
Innovation, Production, and a shared Tech Ops function that keeps every squad running. Joining ITP means turning new ideas into production-ready solutions and running technology on a real scale, so customers get to value faster and strengthen loyalty.

We are seeking a Partner Architect to define and drive the long-term architecture for business-critical products, platforms, and services. This role brings together the disciplines of Solution Architecture and Software Engineering to translate business strategy, customer needs, product direction, and technology trends into coherent logical and physical architectures that teams can implement and operate  will lead through technical depth, judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries.

You will mentor software engineers, prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems the organization faces and review the most consequential architectural decisions. You will operate from enterprise and ecosystem context down to component topology and implementation detail, providing clarity in ambiguous situations and remaining grounded in engineering reality through design validation, prototypes, code and implementation reviews, operational data, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams.

This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an architect who can connect strategy to execution: defining where the platform must go, documenting why, creating standards that scale, and partnering with teams to deliver the architecture incrementally without disrupting customers or business operations. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals.

Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities-    Define, launch, and lead the ITP architecture guild as the cross-organization community of practice for architects and senior engineers, owning its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms so that standards, patterns, tools, and lessons learned scale across teams.

-    Set and evolve architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technology choices, and guardrails that enable consistent, high-quality decisions and reduce ambiguity and rework across teams.

-    Drive AI adoption and transformation through architecture, defining the AI-first reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails (agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI) that teams across ITP, CSS, CSU, and MCAPS use to adopt AI safely and consistently.

-    Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, engineering, and product groups so that a single architecture practice spans planning, funding, design, delivery, and operations.

-    Develop, run, and continuously improve the architecture review process, including intake and triage criteria, objective quality bars, the reviewer pool, architecture decision records, escalation paths, and measures of adoption, cycle time, and outcome quality.

-    Lead reviews of the most consequential products and programs, ensuring decisions are…