Strategic Technology Lead (Azure) - Strategic Partnerships Team

Job Description

Overview

As a company, Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We empower our own people to achieve more and make a difference in the world. Join us and lead transformational impact with our top customers. The Strategic Partnerships Digital Natives Team at Microsoft is at the leading edge of our business (and industry) and one of the fastest growing and most exciting groups in the Company.

We operate like a “startup” within Microsoft and the team driving this initiative is incredibly entrepreneurial and high-performance. Senior leaders across Microsoft are making an incredible commitment to this initiative and we are rapidly scaling this program. Top talent is at the center of our strategy and are looking for new talent to join our expanding team.

The most successful Strategic Partnership Technology Leads are ultra-resourceful, master orchestrators of virtual teams, and exceptionally curious to listen and learn from their customers. These attributes allow them to advise confidently and elevate their customer’s business and build trust in building their products with the power of the Microsoft Platform. This role offers an incredible opportunity to accelerate your career by driving business impact that can change the future. Be a part of a transformative, learning culture that drives innovation.

The ideal candidate will have experience in pre-sales or consultancy with strong technical understanding of cloud technologies.

Responsibilities

The Key responsibilities will include:

• Building strategic technical partnerships early in the sales cycle with strategic startups and cloud native companies to accelerate their growth and build new solutions on Azure.

• Leveraging understanding of the customers’ technical product strategy and business priorities, to craft conceptual architectures on Azure and create credible cloud consumption forecasts

• Understanding customers' overall cloud strategy, technology, business priorities and success measures and advise on solutions (Microsoft Azure and 3rd party solutions) from a broad technical domain of Infrastructure, Applications, Build/Release

• Develop deep relationships with customer executive technical decision makers, to drive long-term strategic partnerships with Microsoft.

Profile Capabilities & Behaviors Required:

• Sales Achiever - Achieve results by understanding digital transformation drivers and customer priorities. Identify new opportunities and help customers accelerate their growth for their own benefit as well as their customers.

• Inspire and influence - Business and Technical decision makers, building trust with stakeholders and translating Microsoft solutions into business impact and outcomes that accelerate the customer’s growth.

• Sales Challenger - Continuously build industry and technical knowledge. Bring innovative industry solutions, benchmarks and references to C-level executives that drive greater efficiencies, optimization and increase customer affinity.

• Deal Orchestrator - Orchestrate virtual technical deal team and all Microsoft resources maximizing revenue opportunity and driving deals forward, building and leveraging repeatable offerings to accelerate and win deals.

• Executive presence – Capable of developing and maintaining relationships at C-Level and above through relevance, industry knowledge and exceptional communication skills.

Qualifications

Required Knowledge and Skills:

• Demonstrable success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications

• Relationship Building. Proven history of building deep technical relationships with senior technology executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects

• Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills

• Language skills – business level French, German (additional European language optional)

Technical Experience (Minimum):

• Technical experience with cloud scale, building infrastructure foundations and producing architectural designs

• Deep experience and expertise in cloud infrastructure and application solutions with the ability to hold detailed conversations on reliability and resiliency, scalability, security, performance optimization and cost management, container and container orchestration such as Kubernetes, observability and Infrastructure as code.

• Competitive Landscape: High level understanding of capabilities on competitive cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. The technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies, understand relevant cloud trends and keep up with modern cloud trends.

Desired technical Experience:

• Knowledge of software development processes and basic understanding of C#, Java, NodeJS and an understanding of how best to leverage Open-Source technologies in delivering applications

• Experience creating Proof of Value (PoV)/Proof of Concepts (PoC)/Demos ​that provide customers with technical confidence on cloud platforms.

• Experience in helping customers optimise cloud environments, including knowledge of commercial and technical optimization approaches and FinOps best practices.

• Azure Certifications or equivalent industry certifications.

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.