Full Job DescriptionMicrosoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.
The Global Partner Solutions team mission is to: build and sell intelligent cloud and intelligent edge solutions with partners, empowering people and organizations to achieve more. GPS is a sales organization accountable for the commercial partner business at Microsoft.
Responsibilities
Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) play a critical role in working with partners to provide deep technical support through solution build and first mile customer engagements such as Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions (ADS), and Hackathons. The CSAs build relationships with partner technical and development resources, designing and architecting new solutions based on Microsoft’s cloud platform and technologies. They deliver value via a portfolio of service delivery engagements optimized to accelerate partner solution builds and first mile customer wins and stand out as a Technology expert due to deep solutions knowledge. They can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft engineering teams and blackbelts often surfacing product issues, providing feedback and insights that accelerate fixes and updates.
Key areas of responsibility – WHAT CSAs do:
Understanding Partner Technical Environment. Identifies and evaluates industry trends, and jointly develops technical enablement plan with partner. Maintains technical skills and knowledge of market trends, opportunities, and competitive insights.
Architecture Design & Deployment. Champions an existing architecture approach, synthesizes data about partner business, applies broad technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge, anticipates technical blockers and adapts methodology to minimize risks.
Practice Development. Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property, technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions.
Trusted Advisor: Develops and expands existing impactful relationships; creates and sustains constructive tension and trust with partner and leads the adoption of Microsoft architecture technologies.
Thought Leadership. Leads virtual teams around technologies and partner challenges, participates in external architect community events and shares learnings with internal team; demonstrates deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions.
Solutions/Offers/Practices. Leads execution of architectural engagements, such as Technical Briefings, Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions, and Hackathons with the goal of defining and bringing new solutions, offers and/or practices to market.
Skilling and Best Practice Sharing. Collaborates with Microsoft’s Engineering and Global Black Belt teams on specific skill requirements for partners and the sharing of best practices; Lead and/or contribute to the delivery of workshops, bootcamps, and trainings necessary to build the technical skills and expertise of partners.
Technical Events & Community Contribution. Attends Digital Transformation/Technology conferences such as Build. Participate in technical panels and user groups, provide insights, and contributes work that is shared across communities.
Qualifications
6-10+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales, technology solutions/practice development, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications
Understanding Partner Technical Environment. Adept at gathering partner insights and mapping architecture and digital transformation solutions to partner business outcomes. Deep understanding of digital transformation business drivers, cloud platforms, emerging computing trends and their impact on partner practice building opportunities.
Architecture Design & Deployment. Skilled at proposing and developing high-value solutions to scale across multiple partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios in collaboration with the partner, meeting business and IT requirements and constraints. Experience in enabling a breadth of highly advanced solutions using enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations and technology management that support the partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation, resolving blockers and accelerating consumption while minimizing business and technical risks.
Practice Development. Skilled in driving sales and consumption, developing and contributing to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud).
Trusted Advisor. Skillfully provides direction to technical decision-makers (TDMs) and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision-makers (BDMs). Knows when to challenge partner decision and/or areas where they might do more and encourages alternative architectures and approaches.
Thought Leadership. Ability to share strong insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams and internal communities; Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects; ability to solve Partner problems through cloud technologies, leveraging internal and/or external resources.
3-5+ years’ experience in one of the deep specializations below.
Callings and Meetings.
Teams Voice and Meetings, Teams Meeting Rooms, Voice Technologies, Network Monitoring & Assessment, Phone System, Call Controls & Apps, Video and Audio Conferencing, Infrastructure and Network Technology, Devices, Managed Meetings, Teams Migration, Operator Connect
Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Virtual Events, Real time media, Surface Hub, 3rd Party Devices, Skype Migration, Skype for Business Migration, Competitive Product Knowledge
Collaboration.
Office 365 components, Microsoft Teams and Verticals, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Project Cortex, Workplace Analytics, OneDrive for Business, Hybrid Deployments, Office 365 Migration
Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Collaboration Portal Knowledge, Viva components, SharePoint Development, Yammer, Stream, Learning Management Systems (LMS) Knowledge, Content Management Knowledge, Adoption and Change Management (ACM), User Journey, User Training, Competitive Product Knowledge
Teams Platform/FLW.
Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Teams Apps, Teams Bots, Azure AD, Azure Q&A Maker, Graph API, Teams API, Project Cortex API, SSO for Firstline Workers, SharePoint Online, Adaptive Cards, Firstline Worker Solutions
Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Coding skills (C#, Javascript, Typescript, React, Powershell, LUIS (Language Understanding), .NET Core / MVC, WebAPI or NodeJS / Express), WebPack, SharePoint Framework, Teams JS SDK, Azure App Services, Azure Bot Services, Viva Components, Competitive Product Knowledge
Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep sales relationships with CXOs and practice building executives in highly strategic ISV (Independent Software Vendor), MSP (Managed Service Provider), and SI (System Integrator) partner types.
Collaboration. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
Communication. Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams. Strong presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences at different levels of organizations.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.