Why this role exists
We are looking for the person who becomes a technical center of gravity for our Azure practice — a name clients ask for, someone engineers want to work under, and a voice in the room when we decide what we sell next.
This is not a management-only role and it is not a delivery-only role. You’ll spend real time in three places: shaping and selling work, executing on it, and building the people and the practice that outlast any single engagement. The mix shifts with what the business needs. The right person is energized by all three and doesn’t retreat into just one.
Our Azure work today spans traditional cloud infrastructure and we do it well. The mandate for this role is to keep that engine strong while deliberately pulling the practice forward into application modernization, Microsoft Fabric and the data estate, and AI. You might be coming from infrastructure, from application development, from data and BI, or from AI — we care less about which door you came in than where you’re headed. We’re hiring you for what you already know. We’re betting on what you’re willing to go learn. If that second part doesn’t appeal, this is the wrong seat.
What you’ll do
Generate and shape demand
- Partner with the sales team as the technical counterpart on target accounts — joining discovery calls, whiteboard sessions, and executive conversations, not just reviewing decks after the fact.
- Identify opportunities inside existing accounts that the account team can’t see, and articulate them in business terms the client will fund.
- Treat an undefined call as your opportunity to find one. If an AE puts you in front of a client, that access is the lead — uncovering what’s actually there is your job, not theirs.
- Lead strategy, discovery, and assessment workshops that turn a vague ambition into a funded roadmap. Done well, this is the first paid step into a much larger program.
- Stay in the account after the SOW is signed. Expansion comes from being present when the next problem surfaces, not from a check-in at renewal.
- Own technical scoping: assumptions, estimate, phasing, risk, and the shape of the statement of work. Your scopes should be ones you’d be willing to deliver yourself.
- Build credibility in the market — customer briefings, webinars, reference architectures, Microsoft partner ecosystem relationships, and content that makes prospects call us first.
- Serve as an escalation point for pre-sales technical objections and competitive positioning.
Deliver
- Act as the senior technical resource on our most complex or highest-risk engagements — architecture, design authority, and hands-on work when the situation calls for it.
- Set the delivery standard: documentation, reusable IP, quality bar, and what “done” means on an engagement.
- Take the small things too. Nothing here is beneath the role — writing the runbook, cleaning up the tenant, sitting on the bridge at 11 p.m., fixing the diagram before it goes to the client. The team watches what you’re willing to do, and it sets the ceiling for what they’re willing to do.
- Recover troubled engagements when they need a senior hand.
Build the bench
- Mentor consultants and engineers deliberately — pairing, design reviews, certification paths, and honest feedback.
- Choose the slower path on purpose. It is always faster to do it yourself than to walk someone else through it, and a practice lead who takes the fast path every time never builds anything bigger than themselves. We’re hiring for the willingness to pay that cost, repeatedly, when nobody would fault you for not paying it.
- Attract talent. Your reputation and network should be a recruiting channel in their own right, and the experience of working with you should be why people stay.
- Develop the next practice leads. The measure of success is that in two to three years we have more people capable of doing this job than we do today.
- Contribute to hiring: bar-setting on interviews, technical assessment, and onboarding.
Set direction
- Work alongside leadership on CTO-type questions: where our consulting services portfolio should go, what we invest in building, what we stop selling, and what capability gaps we need to close.
- Translate Microsoft’s roadmap and the market into a concrete point of view on what CloudServus should offer twelve to twenty-four months out.
- Define and productize service offerings — outcomes, scope, delivery method, pricing model, and enablement material.
- Advise on partner strategy, competency attainment, and technical investments.
Where the lines are
The breadth above only works because you aren’t carrying all of it alone:
- Project management. The PM/CSM owns scope, schedule, budget, and client communication. That doesn’t let you off the hook — stay aware of all of it, and help carry it when the engagement needs it.
- Resource management. You’ll have a strong voice in staffing and fit. You won’t own the schedule or the bench.
- Support queue. Managed services has its own escalation path. You’re the last stop on hard problems, not the first stop on all of them.
- Deal administration. You shape the technical story, the scope, and the estimate. The AE owns the quota, the CRM, and the commercial process.
What we’re looking for
This is a breadth role with real depth in a few places. The depth we can’t do without is in pre-sales, developing people, and having a view on where this practice should go. Technical depth matters and is covered further down — but nobody clears this bar on architecture skill alone.
Required
- 8+ years in consulting, MSP, or enterprise IT, with meaningful time in a client-facing senior or lead capacity.
- A track record of directly influencing revenue: opportunities you found, scopes you wrote, deals you helped close.
- Evidence that people have grown under you and followed you — specific people, not headcount.
- Something you built that outlasted your involvement: an offering, a methodology, reusable IP, or a person now doing work they couldn’t do before.
- A point of view on where Microsoft cloud consulting is heading, and the willingness to argue for it with people who disagree.
- Deep expertise in at least one area of the Azure landscape below, and enough working knowledge across the rest to hold an architecture conversation and know when to bring in help.
- Strong command of Azure fundamentals regardless of the path you came in on — networking, identity and Entra ID, governance, security, IaC, and cost management. In cloud consulting these aren’t an infrastructure specialty; they’re the ground everything else stands on.
- Deliberate movement toward newer workloads over the past few years — evidence you went there on purpose, not just where projects happened to take you.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive audiences.
- Ablity to work effectively as a remote leader — self-directed, visible to the team, and present with clients without needing a room to do it. Occasional travel for client engagements, partner events, and team meetings.
Preferred
- Microsoft expert-level certification (AZ-305, AZ-400, SC-100, or equivalent), or associate-level certifications in AI, data and analytics, or Power Platform.
- Experience in a Microsoft partner environment, particularly one carrying multiple solution partner designations.
- Experience defining and launching a service offering from scratch.
- Background across both mid-market and enterprise clients.
The landscape you’d be working in
This is the ground the practice covers. It’s a map, not a checklist — nobody is deep in all of it, and we don’t expect you to be.
- Cloud platform — landing zones, networking, Entra ID, governance, IaC (Bicep or Terraform), AKS, Azure Arc, security, and cost management.
- Application development and modernization — App Service, Container Apps, AKS, Azure Functions, API Management, Logic Apps, .NET, Microsoft Graph, and CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
- Data and analytics — Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, Synapse, Data Factory, Databricks, Power BI, Purview, and lakehouse or medallion patterns.
- AI — Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, generative AI and machine learning, RAG, agentic patterns, and Copilot extensibility.
How we’ll know it’s working
- Pipeline sourced or materially shaped by you, and the win rate on it.
- Whether the work you scoped delivers to that estimate — you own both the number and the follow-through that makes it hold.
- Client outcomes and repeat business on engagements you led.
- Growth of the team under you — capability, retention, and referrals.
- Revenue from modern workload engagements, growing year over year.
Compensation and benefits
- A strong base at market for a senior technical leader. You should be able to build a life on it without thinking about the bonus.
- The bonus is where the person we’re looking for actually makes their money. The plan pays on the three things this role controls — your billable contribution, sales you source or shape, and the performance and growth of your team — weighted so that all three matter and none of them can be ignored. You should never have to choose between a deal, a delivery, and a person. If you perform on all three, the number gets large, and we’d rather write that check than cap it.
- Remote-first with limited travel.
- Health, dental, vision, retirement, PTO, other benefits.
Pay: From $175,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Flexible schedule
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Vision insurance
Application Question(s):
- Will you now, or in the future, require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g. H-1B visa status)?
- Where is your deepest technical experience?
- How many years in a client-facing consulting, MSP, or partner environment/role?
Work Location: Remote
