Security Architect — Microsoft Security Platform
Practice
Cyber Security, Avanade India
Location
Bengaluru / Delhi NCR (Hybrid)
Experience
12–14 years in the cyber security domain, with current, hands-on design and implementation experience across the Microsoft security platform — Microsoft Sentinel, Defender, Entra ID, Intune and Purview
Role Summary
Avanade India’s Cyber Security practice is looking for a Security Architect with strong hands-on experience across the Microsoft security estate. This is a client-facing role for someone who can design a Sentinel and Defender architecture, work alongside a client SOC team on the detail, and present the design credibly to senior client stakeholders.
The emphasis is on breadth across the Microsoft security platform — threat protection, cloud security, identity and data security — and the ability to design them as one integrated architecture rather than a set of separately deployed products. You will lead the security workstream on client engagements, support pursuits as the security SME, and contribute to the practice’s standards and reusable IP.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the security architecture for client engagements — target-state design, Zero Trust design, control mapping and a prioritised security roadmap aligned to the client’s risk profile.
- Design and implement Microsoft Sentinel: workspace and tenant design, ingestion strategy, log tiering and cost optimisation, detection engineering in KQL, and SOAR playbooks.
- Support migrations from legacy SIEM platforms (Splunk, QRadar, ArcSight and similar) to Microsoft Sentinel — content and use-case migration, parallel running and validation.
- Design across Microsoft Defender XDR — Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Identity, Defender for Office 365 and Defender for Cloud Apps — covering deployment architecture, policy design, tuning and incident investigation.
- Design cloud posture and workload security with Defender for Cloud — CSPM and CWPP, secure score improvement and regulatory compliance dashboards.
- Architect identity security on Entra ID: conditional access design, Privileged Identity Management, identity governance, and passwordless and phishing-resistant authentication.
- Design endpoint security through Intune — security baselines, attack surface reduction and compliance policies — integrated with Defender for Endpoint.
- Design Microsoft Purview solutions for data security: information protection and sensitivity labelling, and DLP.
- Run security assessments and maturity reviews — gap analysis against NIST CSF, ISO 27001, CIS and Microsoft Zero Trust maturity, with prioritised remediation roadmaps.
- Contribute to detection strategy and SOC ways of working — use-case catalogues, detection engineering lifecycle and incident response runbooks.
- Advise on securing AI adoption — Copilot readiness and oversharing remediation, and the data security controls that make AI deployment defensible.
- Align security design to regulatory and data protection requirements — India’s DPDP Act, GDPR, and sector guidance such as RBI, SEBI or IRDAI where applicable.
- Support security solutioning on pursuits — workshops, solution architecture, estimation and proposal content.
- Contribute to practice IP — reference architectures, deployment accelerators and detection content — and mentor security consultants and analysts.
Required Skills & Experience
- 12–14 years in cyber security across architecture, engineering, consulting or security operations, with a substantial recent focus on the Microsoft security platform.
- Hands-on design and implementation experience across Microsoft Sentinel, Defender XDR, Defender for Cloud, Entra ID and Intune, with working knowledge of Purview.
- Strong Microsoft Sentinel depth: ingestion and cost architecture, KQL proficiency, detection engineering and automation with Logic Apps.
- Design and deployment experience across the Defender suite, including policy and exclusion strategy and alert tuning.
- Purview experience across information protection and DLP, including classification and labelling strategy.
- Solid identity security background: Entra ID architecture, conditional access, privileged access and hybrid identity.
- Working knowledge of Azure platform security — network security, Key Vault, encryption, and how platform design affects security posture.
- Practical command of security frameworks and standards: NIST CSF, ISO 27001, CIS Controls, MITRE ATT&CK and Zero Trust reference models.
- Experience leading security assessments and producing prioritised, client-ready roadmaps.
- Incident response and threat landscape awareness — able to reason about attacker behaviour, not only about product configuration.
- Strong client-facing consulting skills, including senior stakeholder engagement and contribution to pre-sales solutioning.
- Clear technical writing — architecture documents, assessment reports and runbooks at client-ready quality.
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Preferred / Good to Have
- Microsoft certifications: SC-100, SC-200, SC-300, SC-400 or AZ-500; industry certifications such as CISSP or CISM.
- Experience with data protection and regulatory requirements applicable to Indian and global clients.
- Automation and IaC for security deployment — PowerShell, Logic Apps, Bicep or Terraform for repeatable security configuration.
- Multi-cloud security exposure (AWS, GCP) and integration of third-party tooling into Sentinel.
- Experience supporting MDR or managed security services.
- Experience in regulated industries — BFSI, healthcare, energy or public sector.
- Experience in a global delivery / SI or Microsoft partner environment with distributed teams.
- Experience mentoring junior security consultants and analysts.
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