Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Africa is one of the best places on the planet to bring our mission to life. It is home to people and 54 countries. The talent in Africa reflects a tremendously rich and diverse potential that can truly impact the world over the next few decades. Being the youngest continent in the world with a median age of just years, Africa is contributing to +12M youth being added to the global labor force every year. By 2040, half of the world’s young people will live in Africa.
Africa’s growth is propelled by being a mobile-first continent that is fueling connectivity, innovation, and scalability.
Our aspiration is to transform Africa into a Cloud-first, Digital-first continent enabling a thriving digital economy across Africa while reinventing Microsoft’s digital assets and capabilities to serve the young continent’s transformation needs. With that in mind was the establishment of a new team; the Africa Transformation Office (ATO), which will be established and chartered with the following:
Build strategic, unconventional partnerships with key governments, institutions, and enterprises to enable and accelerate the digital economy across the African continent.
Develop digital marketing engines to enable and accelerate Startups and SMBs.
Plan and land infrastructure enablers and game-changers in the continent.
Enable Africa as a Foreign Direct Investment destination supported by expanding our technologies for MNCs across key industries.
Manage the 4Afrika initiative and further integrate it into key company programs and engines to amplify its impact.
Foster digital skilling and job creation to maximize the economic opportunity for the African youth and workforce.
Role Summary
Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated team that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes. Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative, and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is hiring professionals that will drive customer cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market.
We are always learning. Insatiably curious. We lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. We build on each other’s ideas because we are better together. We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve and are motivated every day to empower others to do more and achieve more through our technology and innovation. Together we make a difference. We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate App Innovation Architect focusing on Azure Application Innovation to join the ATO.
This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning design, build, and production with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges.
As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within the MicrosoftAfricacustomer base. You will work with select customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management, and Developers.
You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, ensuring technical blockers are removed on adoption. You will drive the technical intensity of developers and create communities within customers. And you will collaborate with Product engineering to share feedback on the development of Microsoft products and help develop the Azure platform.
Responsibilities
Understand customers’ overall applications portfolio, IT and business priorities, and success measures to design implementation architectures and solutions (Microsoft and 3rd party solutions) using PaaS, DevOps & Advanced Application coding.
Apply technical knowledge and customer insights to empower customers to create a modernization journey roadmap. Architect solutions to meet business and IT needs, ensuring technical viability of new projects and successful deployments, while orchestrating key resources and infusing key Infrastructure technologies including Kubernetes, Azure PaaS services App Service, Java, containers, serverless, cloud-native, etc.) and Application
Development with low code options and DevOps and GitHub technologies as appropriate.
Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects and MS stakeholders in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform.
Ensure all solutions exhibit a “Well-Architected” framework, such as high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, and appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment.
Run Architectural Design Session to build a plan for implementing the solution –governing design in line with customer business goals and their technical environment. The outcome is consensus on solution design and next steps toward production.
Develop deep relationships with key customer IT decision-makers, who drive long-term cloud adoption within their company to enable them to be cloud advocates.
Be the Voice of the Customer; Share insights and best practices, and connect with Engineering teams to remove blockers.
Troubleshoot technical issues to prove the value of the implementation of Azure technologies.
Assess the Customers’ knowledge of the Azure platform and overall cloud readiness to support customers through a structured learning plan and ensure its delivery through partners. Collaborate with others in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform.
Maintain technical skills and knowledge of market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the technical community.
Be an Azure Platform evangelist with customers, partners, and external communities.
Build and grow developer communities by driving activities including OpenHacks, Workshops.
Compliance
Personally, commit to generating and protecting Microsoft’s trust by modeling integrity every day and contributing to ethical sales and sustainable growth.
Qualifications
Professional
Professional Experience. 5+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications.
Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior IT executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solutions/projects.
Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies.
Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts, and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT management, Administrators, and Developers).
Technical
Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management.
Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud).
Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud-native app hosting through software design, development, deployment, and app refactoring/migrations.
Web application server technologies, cloud application design, software architecture, and practices; (design/development/deployment, Agile, SCRUM, ALM).
Experience with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, etc.), API management, microservice frameworks, SDKs, etc.
Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD toolchains (Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Visual Studio).
Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of cloud development platforms preferred.
Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred.
Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, web application development, cloud-native application architecture (containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD toolchains Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub).
Certification in one or more of the following programming languages preferred: C++, C#, Java, Python.
Experiences
Prior work experience in a Consulting/Architecture position within a software and/or services company such as Amazon, VMware, Google, IBM, OraclePreferred.
Location
Lagos.
