Digital Cloud Solution Architect

Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is seeking talented professional that will drive customer cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market. We are always learning. Insatiably curious. We lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. We build on each other’s ideas because we are better together. We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve and are motivated every day to empower others to do more and achieve more through our technology and innovation. Together we make a difference.   
   

The Digital Cloud Acquisition team drives growth for Microsoft by helping customers realize the value of the Microsoft Cloud. Powered by a world-class connected sales and marketing platform, this team leverages marketing insights to reach customers when and where they want to engage digitally to help solve their business problems. We’re powered by the latest innovations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to engage with customers, collaborate across our global teams, and acquire and retain new business for Microsoft. 

Do you love working with customers to achieve their business outcomes? Would you love to build expertise around the leading, next generation cloud services? As a Digital Cloud Solution Architect (CSA), you will become part of the next generation of sales leaders at Microsoft. With the aid of best-in-class sales processes, techniques and technologies, you will be empowered to shape customer relationships for a strategic set of Microsoft's customers. These customers are adopting industry-leading products and services for their businesses, education systems or governments. You will serve as the central point of contact for the customer across engagements helping to drive Microsoft's existing cloud & enterprise consumption through developing and managing customer relationships.   

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 

• 5+ years experience in technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales 
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales 
  • OR Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 3+ years experience in technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales 
  • OR equivalent experience. 

Additional or Preferred Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years experience in technical architect, consulting, design and implementation, and/or sales 
  • OR equivalent experience.  
• 4+ years experience with cloud-based solution designs, migrations and management of technology.  

Sales Customer Engagements 

• Proactively engages with and reaches out to customer technical decision makers and influencers proactively and independently. Utilizes information on customer business, industry, needs, competitive landscape and key priorities to support customer's digital transformation, challenge them when necessary, and position the customer to deliver architectures. Keeps up to date with customer information, industry and market trends, and compliance regulations. 
• Uses knowledge of customer context, cross-solution or portfolio expertise, and deep technical and market/industry knowledge to build credibility with customers individually or at scale.  
• Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams, leveraging knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider, co-sell Partners), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds).Searches for customer references to use in engagements. 
• Leverages knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center, demo sites, virtual sites) with limited managerial support and proactively engages product and support teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate blockers by conveying impact. 
• Understands team resources and supports efforts to maximize the impact of customer engagements through capacity planning, prioritization, capabilities assessment, and utilization of resources. Receives instructions to prioritize resources and works to maximize selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy as directed. 

Scale Through Partners 

• Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by acting as liaison between the partner and team and shares visibility on partner resources and processes. Raises escalations or alleviates blockers through collaboration with manager-level counterparts in cross-functional groups. 
• Captures core knowledge across solution areas and delivers back to product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop compete strategies. 
• Applies and customizes existing demonstration assets. Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., Architectural Design Sessions, Proof of Concept sessions) of solutions based on multiple 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. 
• Monitors and analyzes action plans to promote customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customer’s business outcomes. Identifies opportunities to promote usage. 

Architecture Design and Deployment 

• Receives and synthesizes data about customer/partner business and technical requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. 
• Drives pilots, proof of concept (POC), and value (e.g., optimizing solutions and costs) for multiple technical solutions across technology areas to prove the proposed architecture design. Moves the customer forward from pilots to productive deployments by rooting pilots in business impact. Appropriately leverages growth levers (e.g., Azure Credit Offer [ACO]) to ensure successful adoption of POCs. 
• Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s). Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.  
• Identifies, escalates, and works to resolve technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) to accelerate architecture implementations, and routes non-technical issues for removal by appropriate party. 
• Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and/or minimize business and/or technical risks, defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks whilst designing and/or delivering solutions. 

Driving Customer Success 

• Builds customer timelines to identify and gain buy in on metrics in conjunction with partners to align with customer's digital transformation initiative and expand customer success coverage as a discipline. Establishes cadence for checking in and reporting on people, process and technology progress. 
• Acts as the Voice of the Customer by driving new feedback, blockers, insights, resource (e.g., OneList, End Customer Investment Funds) items across territories so they can be added and prioritized. Represents the customer to product teams to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory. 
• Identifies gaps and drives new workloads through communication of financial value to the customer, collaborating with sales team and driving new workloads. Builds on her or his network and industry experience to connect customers with ideas, people, and resources to new support customer opportunities. Cultivates the strategic image of Microsoft as a valued business partner that serves a wide range of customers/partners by aligning the vision for Microsoft cloud technologies with future industry needs. Creates a vision with business solution scenarios and partners/services that helps the customer meet their business goals and achieve their long-term corporate vision. Enables partners to a certain extent on projects to be a part of the client-side team. 
• Drives new workloads jointly with sales team by leading demand generation and actively identifying new engagements. Holds peer teams accountable, and brings insights to drive success of Microsoft cloud solutions by taking ownership of milestones within engagements. Drives One Microsoft mindset. 
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Technical Leadership 

• Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.  
• Shares ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with team members using knowledge of Microsoft cloud solutions and their context in the competitive landscape. Provides thought leadership by acting as role model for the architect community and consistently sharing knowledge to increase the functional or technical skills and expertise of peers in ways that impact career goals and business outcomes. 
• 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. 
• Conducts group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, webinars) to present and educate customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits across Microsoft solutions/products. Ensures customer cloud platform enablement by gaining buy in at the C-level for cloud platform readiness and orchestrating various resources within Microsoft, partner, and customer resources to get them on board with Microsoft's cloud platform environment readiness initiative. 

Other 

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