Azure Incubations Architect

We're looking for a Azure Incubations Architect - Azure Incubations to join the Azure Open Source Incubation team. We're part of the CTO's office and we're responsible for identifying new product ideas, incubating those ideas, and if they're successful, handing those incubated ideas off to Azure's service teams. We work closely with the open-source community as part of our endeavor. 

Innovation is challenging work, and, if we're pushing ourselves to explore new ideas, we'll find that many of our projects will fail. We've created a psychologically safe environment for experimentation and incubation. When we find good ideas, we double down on those ideas, building out the idea into a fully functional product. 

We work primarily in the cloud native, developer tools, and security areas, though other areas are open for investigation as well. Our primary customers are software developers building applications in the cloud. Recent projects include Dapr, Radius, Copacetic, and the recently announced Project Drasi. These open source projects have varying levels of maturity in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), from Sandbox to Graduated.  

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.

As architect, you will be responsible for the overall architecture of Azure Incubations projects. You will work across engineering, product management, partner teams at Microsoft, and the open source community to identify and design incubations and then, if those incubations prove successful, help transition the incubations into production teams at Microsoft. 

As part of your work you will partner with the Group Manager for Incubations, who runs engineering and product management for Incubations. Together you will assess new ideas, design solutions for ideas that are promising, and deliver prototypes that enable us to further explore these ideas. You are hands on and enjoy building prototypes yourself.  

In this job you are focused on delivering success. You know that considering intriguing new ideas is only part of what we do. Our real job is to build; the teams you lead help ensure Microsoft stays on the leading edge of cloud computing. You have a track record of starting new projects and experience with nimbly changing technical direction as projects evolve. 

In this job you will do a lot of learning. Because we work on the leading edge of cloud native computing and distributed computing, we'll rely on you to master new concepts quickly, leveraging your unique experiences to help us understand these concepts in relation to existing concepts. You are successful because you leverage your depth of experience in areas like cloud computing, distributed computing, and/or developer tools. 

In this job you'll understand that, if we're doing our work well, then about 50% of our projects will fail. You understand that failure is a natural part of incubation. You'll ensure we share what we've learned from our incubations so that other Microsoft employees as well as members of the open source community can learn from our experiments.