Azure Technology Specialists - App Innovation

In Small, Medium, Corporate (SMC) and Digital Sales, we have set out with the purpose of empowering our customers through the unique value of the Microsoft cloud by building a globally led, digital-first scale organization aligned with partners. As part of local subsidiaries or Digital Sales centers around the world, you will support a dedicated set of customers in identifying and achieving their business objectives through best-in-class digital engagement and partner co-selling. You will also have an opportunity to work cross-collaboratively while living our shared SMC and Digital Sales Culture priorities: Diversity and Inclusivity, Wellbeing, Sustainability, and Learning. If you have been described as customer obsessed and have a passion for digital-first solutions, we invite you to learn more about the SMC and Digital Sales organization and the value we deliver to our customers, partners, and one another, every day.

As an Azure App Innovation Specialist, you are a business leader with technical expertise working with our most important managed customers. You will lead a virtual team of sales, technical, and services resources to help customers realize digital transformation through cloud computing achieve/exceed quarterly Azure Infrastructure consumption targets for related workloads in your assigned accounts. You possess both a high EQ with executive presence, able to engage with senior decision makers to uncover digital transformation initiatives, and a passion to learning how Azure cloud services can deliver digital transformation. You will develop and maintain an Azure Infrastructure expertise, able to identify projects, build a compelling business case, and drive the consumption project to production. You will build and maintain relationships with customers, influence long-term strategic direction and act as a trusted advisor driving engagement at the CXO level with technology decision makers. You will help customers evaluate their cloud strategy, determine approaches to application and data migration and modernization, and recommend solutions that meet their requirements.

This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your solution sales and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms and 3+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience or
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience or equivalent experience

Experience with the following services:

Applications:

• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Azure App Service

Data:

• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure SQL Database
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Artificial Intelligence:

• Azure AI Services (including Azure OpenAI Service)
• Azure AI Studio

Developer Platform:

• GitHub Enterprise

What We're Looking For:

• Expertise in cloud-native architecture, including microservices, containers, APIs, and serverless solutions.
• Proficiency in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), serverless computing, and other Azure-native tools to build new cloud-native applications or modernize existing ones.
• Proficiency in software development with languages such as .Net, Java, Python, or others.
• Experience with CI/CD and DevOps integration solutions such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, or Git.
• Experience in AI development and integration, including vision, text, and language models.
• Familiarity with integration services like API gateways (API Management, Apigee, MuleSoft, Kafka) and event handling.
• Knowledge of GitHub and DevOps automation.

Technical Skills:

• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, micro-services and API's
• Development/Coding experience
• Experience with Git, Azure DevOps, and Azure

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting, or related experience.
• 4+ years of experience with cloud and hybrid, or on-premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• Certification in relevant (Microsoft or industry) technologies or disciplines (e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).

Scale Customer Engagements

• Engages with customer technical decision makers and anticipates customer needs and issues proactively through data gathering.
• Uses knowledge of customer context and solution or portfolio expertise to build credibility with customers individually or at scale. Develops technical and market/industry knowledge.
• Ensures technical wins for core technologies by driving technical discussions with customers. Improves customer interactions through feedback and observation.
• Engages other internal resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center, demo sites, virtual sites), mapping out and leveraging foundational resource knowledge for key areas of technology as needed to overcome technical blockers on assigned technology set.

Scale Through Partners

• Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by contributing to the facilitation of technical engagements and partnering with colleagues to manage the sales process.

Build Strategy

• Shares competitive insights from customer sessions with colleagues and escalates/resolves competitive situations to influence compete strategies.
• Provides strategic, technical input based on Microsoft capability to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner and internal teams.
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC) by driving new feedback, blockers, insights, resource (e.g., OneList) items across communities so they can be added and prioritized.
• Works with account teams to tailor Microsoft messaging to audience and captures and shares customer feedback using knowledge of specific Microsoft solutions and their context in a competitive landscape.
• Collaborates with team members to monitor and analyze customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customer’s business outcomes. Identifies opportunities to promote usage.

Solution Design and Proof

• Identifies and applies existing demonstration assets. Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions [ADS], proof of concept [POC] sessions) of solutions based on specific Microsoft products through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment. Reviews partner demonstrations and provides feedback to ensure alignment with Microsoft standards.
• Presents and applies reference architectures across technologies/solution areas to partners or customers for their technology sets.
• Expands awareness of and begins practicing digital transformation sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales).

Technical Leadership

• Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.
• Conducts group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, Webinars) or leverages existing scale enablement programs to present and educate customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits across Microsoft solutions/products.
• Monitors and responds to internal and external tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathon, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area. Contributes and participates in Customer Executive Briefing Center sessions. Shares best practices internally on community calls and drives recognition of Microsoft cloud solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences.

Other

• Embody our culture and values