Azure Platform SME — Solutioning & Pre-Sales

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 one. 

• 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 only 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 ongoing 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.