Principal Data Architect

Overview

The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate.

Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world. TEAM OVERVIEW: The Vanquish Platform team builds and operates a mission‑critical data and detection platform that powers Microsoft’s Security and Compliance solutions across M365. The team is responsible for large‑scale data ingestion, processing, analytics, and detection pipelines that enable timely identification of adversary activity and protection of customer data. Operating at cloud scale, Vanquish focuses on platform reliability, secure‑by‑design architectures, and continuous modernization to ensure high signal fidelity, operational resilience, and compliance across diverse regulatory environments.

ROLE OVERVIEW – We are seeking a highly experienced Data Architect to drive the data architecture strategy for the Vanquish platform. In this role, you will design and evolve scalable, reliable, and secure data architectures across ingestion, processing, analytics, and detection pipelines. You will partner closely with engineering, security, and platform teams to modernize legacy designs, improve data quality and observability, and ensure the platform can meet stringent reliability, performance, and compliance requirements. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in distributed data systems, cloud‑scale analytics, and security‑centric data design. You will play a key role in shaping long‑term architectural direction, influencing engineering best practices, and enabling the platform to detect threats faster while maintaining operational rigor. 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. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the end‑to‑end data architecture for the Vanquish platform, covering large‑scale ingestion, processing, analytics, and detection pipelines for M365 Security workloads.
• Lead platform modernization by evolving legacy designs into scalable, reliable, and secure cloud‑native data architectures with strong observability and operational rigor.
• Partner with engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to improve data quality, latency, and reliability while meeting strict compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Establish architectural standards and best practices for data flow, schema design, retention, governance, and access control across the platform.
• Influence reliability strategy by identifying systemic risks, reducing failure modes, and shaping long‑term investments aligned with detection SLAs and adversary‑response needs.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects, building architectural depth and strengthening design review, incident learning, and engineering fundamentals.
• Act as a technical authority and advisor for cross‑team initiatives, ensuring architectural alignment with M365 Security priorities and business outcomes.
  
  

Qualifications

• 15+ years of industry experience designing and building large scale, distributed cloud systems, with deep focus on data platforms, analytics, and reliability at scale
• Proven expertise in data architecture for high volume ingestion, processing, analytics, and detection pipelines in cloud environments (Azure scale systems preferred)
• Strong background in security centric data systems, including telemetry, threat detection, monitoring, compliance, and secure by design architectures
• Hands on experience with cloud data technologies (e.g., streaming ingestion, batch processing, analytics engines, storage systems, and data orchestration) and operating them in production
• Demonstrated ability to drive platform reliability and operational excellence, including incident analysis, reducing recurring failure modes, and improving observability and automation
• Experience influencing architecture across multiple teams, setting standards, reviewing designs, and driving alignment without direct authority
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with ability to partner across engineering, security, infrastructure, and product stakeholders to deliver business outcomes
  
  

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

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