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.