Role Summary
Avanade India’s Cloud & Infrastructure practice is looking for an Azure Platform SME who can sit in front of a customer, understand their landscape, ask the right questions and shape the solution — then design and build it. This is a pre-sales-led role with real technical depth: the same person runs the discovery conversation, proposes the architecture, prepares the estimate and proposal, and stays hands-on enough to design and provision the environment.
We are looking for someone whose strength is consultative rather than order-taking. Much of the value in this role comes before any design is written — in asking the questions that surface the customer’s constraints, dependencies and real drivers, and in proposing an approach that fits their landscape rather than a standard template.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead customer discovery discussions and workshops — understand the current landscape across on-premises and cloud estate, applications, infrastructure, network, identity, security, operations and existing commitments.
- Ask structured, probing questions to surface business drivers, constraints, dependencies, compliance requirements, timelines and success criteria — and identify what the customer has not said as much as what they have.
- Translate discovery findings into a proposed Azure solution — target architecture, options with clear trade-offs (cost, risk, effort, timeline), phasing and a recommended approach.
- Present and defend the proposed solution to customer stakeholders, from technical teams through to IT and business leadership, and adapt the pitch to the audience in the room.
- Prepare proposals and pre-sales collateral end to end — solution write-ups, architecture diagrams, bill of materials, assumptions, dependencies, risks, scope boundaries and SOW inputs.
- Own effort and cost estimation — Azure consumption sizing and pricing, resource-level estimates, licensing considerations, and services effort estimates with clear assumptions behind the numbers.
- Respond to RFPs, RFIs and customer questionnaires, working with sales, delivery and practice leadership to build a coherent and competitive response.
- Design Azure platform architecture: subscription and environment strategy, landing zone, networking and connectivity, identity, security baselines, governance, monitoring, backup and DR.
- Provision, configure and validate Azure resources hands-on — building POCs, pilots and initial environments to prove the solution and de-risk delivery.
- Shape migration approaches for customer workloads — assessment, sizing, wave planning, migration method and cutover considerations.
- Hand over cleanly to delivery teams and remain available as design authority — design reviews, escalation support and architecture governance through the engagement.
- Build reusable pre-sales assets: reference architectures, solution templates, estimation models, proposal boilerplate and discovery question sets that shorten future pursuits.
- Engage Microsoft and partner stakeholders on joint pursuits, funding programmes and co-sell motions where applicable.
- Mentor junior architects and pre-sales consultants, and raise the quality bar on solution and proposal work across the practice.
.
Required Skills & Experience
- 8–11 years of overall experience in cloud solution architecture, infrastructure or cloud pre-sales, with a strong recent focus on Microsoft Azure.
- Solid Azure platform knowledge across the core stack: compute, storage, networking, identity, security, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, and the platform services commonly used by enterprise workloads.
- Proven customer-facing solutioning experience — running discovery discussions and workshops, understanding a customer landscape quickly, and proposing an appropriate solution rather than a generic.
- Strong questioning and listening skills, with the judgement to challenge assumptions constructively and to identify gaps, risks and dependencies early.
- Hands-on experience designing and provisioning Azure resources — able to build and configure environments personally, not produce diagrams.
- Demonstrated pre-sales track record: proposals, solution write-ups, bill of materials, RFP/RFI responses and client-facing presentations.
- Strong estimation capability — Azure sizing and cost estimation, effort estimation for services, and the discipline to document assumptions, exclusions and risks clearly.
- Experience designing Azure landing zones and migration approaches for enterprise customers.
- Azure networking depth: hub-and-spoke topologies, ExpressRoute and VPN, NSGs/UDRs, firewalling and routing, Private Link and DNS design.
- Working knowledge of Azure identity and security: Entra ID and hybrid identity, RBAC, conditional access, Key Vault and Defender for Cloud.
- Ability to produce clear, well-structured architecture and proposal documentation (HLD, solution overview, migration plan) at client-ready quality.
- Scripting capability in PowerShell and/or CLI for provisioning, configuration and operational tasks.
- Confident communication and presentation skills, with the credibility to hold a room of senior customer stakeholders.
Preferred / Good to Have
- Infrastructure as Code experience — Terraform, Bicep or ARM templates — and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions. Good to have, not essential; willingness to build this depth is expected.
- Microsoft certifications: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), Azure Administrator (AZ-104), Azure Network Engineer (AZ-700), or security certifications such as SC-100 / SC-200.
- Working knowledge of Microsoft 365, Intune/EMS and endpoint management as part of an integrated customer estate.
- Experience with Microsoft partner programmes — partner capability alignment, specialization readiness, Microsoft field engagement or distributor GTM.
- AWS or GCP exposure for multi-cloud positioning and comparative solutioning.
- Familiarity with Azure AI and data services (Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Fabric) and how those workloads land on a governed platform.
- FinOps awareness — cost optimisation, right-sizing and consumption management.
- Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy environments (BFSI, healthcare, energy, public sector), including data residency requirements.
- Experience in a global delivery / SI or Microsoft partner environment working with distributed teams.
- Prior contribution to reusable accelerators, reference architectures or practice-building initiatives.
.
