Through our partners, Microsoft brings digital ambitions to life by helping companies empower their employees, engage their customers, optimize their operations, and transform their products.
As such, we are looking for a highly motivated and passionate individual to join the Microsoft Global Partner Solutions (GPS) team as a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) for AI. Joining the GPS team as a CSA means you will be playing a critical role helping Microsoft Partners to capitalize on the over $2.2 trillion-dollar Digital Transformation market opportunity. Working in GPS means you are shaping the world’s largest eco-system of technology companies working to digitally transform the world’s most innovative companies, large and small.
Microsoft welcomes and embraces your individuality! The ideal candidate for the CSA role can come in many forms. This individual is someone who is passionate about technology and one who possesses a strong subset or combination of the requirements listed below.
We embrace flexible working as a core principle of reinventing productivity, and you’ll have flexibility to work from different locations, such as your home office, Microsoft offices around the country, or customer sites.
The Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) in this role will …
• Play a critical role in working with partners to provide deep AI technical support through solution build and first mile customer engagements including Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions (ADS), and Hackathons
• Build relationship with partner technical and development resources designing and architecting new solutions based on Microsoft’s AI cloud platform and technologies. CSAs deliver value via a portfolio of service delivery engagements optimized to accelerate partner solution builds and first mile customer wins.
• Stand out as a technology expert due to deep solutions knowledge and technical sales skills. They can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft Engineering teams and Blackbelts often surfacing product issues, feeding back value data and insights that accelerate fixes and updates. Also, work with our sales teams to help unblock technical issues to help close the deal.
• Work across partner types including ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), MSP (Managed Service Providers), and SIs (System Integrators).
Partner Enablement and Execution• Enablement Execution: Lead and/or contribute to the delivery of workshops, bootcamps, and trainings necessary to build the technical skills and expertise of partners
• Technical Engagement: Lead the execution of deep technical engagements, including; Technical Briefings, Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions, and Hackathons with the goal of defining and brining new solutions to market
• Skilling and Best Practice Sharing: Network and collaborate with Microsoft’s Engineering and Global Black Belt teams on specific skill requirements for partners and the sharing of best practices
• Practice & Solution Development: Improve partners’ success in implementing solutions and/or practice development by increasing the number of FastTrack endorsed architects in the partner’s organization
• Evangelism: Evangelize partners’ practices and solutions in customers’ implementations via Technical briefings and Architecture Review Sessions
• Tech Sales: Enable partners on technical pre-sales skills while supporting initial partners’ wins and work to unblock technical issues.
Technical Upskilling and Networking• Technical Acumen: Maintain technical skills and knowledge of market trends, opportunities, and competitive insights by staying abreast of various in-person and virtual events delivered by Industry thought leaders such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC, ISG/Saugatuck
• Technical Networking: Invest in own LinkedIn Profile to promote expertise and experiences. Build an expansive Network of partner technical contacts, as well as internal Microsoft contacts including Engineering, Global Blackbelts, M&O and peer Architects
• Technical Events and Community Contribution: Attend Digital Transformation/Technology conferences such as Build. Participate in technical panels and user groups, provide insights, and contribute work that is shared across communities such as MSDN and Channel9
- Proven track record of building deep technical sales relationships with CXOs and practice building executives in ISV, MSP, CD and Sis. required
• Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. required
• Strong partner relationship management skills. required
• Ability to solve Partner problems and unblock technical issues through cloud technologies, leveraging internal and/or external resources. required
• Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. required
• 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. required
Technical - Deep understanding of digital transformation business drivers, cloud platforms, emerging computing trends and their impact on partner practice building opportunities. required
• 6-10+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales, technology solutions/practice development, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications required
• 3-5+ years experience: AI Compute (e.g. Spark, DSVM, AKS), AI on Data (e.g. Cosmos DB DB, SQL DB, Data Lake), Azure Databricks , Azure ML, Azure Search and Knowledge Mining, Azure Cognitive Services and Bots, AI Tools & Frameworks (e.g. Jupyter, PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX)
Additional or Preferred Qualifications :
Education• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineer or related field preferred
• Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, mobile, web application development, cloud-native application architecture (i.e. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure), Prosci
Experiences• Prior work experience in a consulting/architecture position within a Software an/or Services company such as Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, SAP, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Snowflake, MapR desired
Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: RDBMS (A-SQL, SQL MI), RDBMS OSS (MySQL, Postgres. Maria DB), NoSQL (CDB, Mongo, Cassandra), Security, Competitive Product Knowledge
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