Responsibilities

As an Azure Apps & Infra Technical Specialist, you will:

• Lead technical discussions with customers leveraging processes and tools, demos and programs; use consultative and/or Challenger method; establish rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams.
• Build strategy: map the agreed customer vision into a strategy, resolving concerns, preventing and removing technical blockers, and validating a business case for investment and translated technology complexity into business impact. Work with the customer, account team, and partners to orchestrate a roadmap for implementation.
• Drive technical assessments to create a map of the current landscape and to build the technical migration plans, thus building a solid migration business case.
• Design the solution using your technical knowledge, architectural approach, consultancy skills and our methodology to win a customer’s technical decision and meet the customer’s needs. Ensure technical decision maker agrees with proposed architecture and on the migration plan. Drive POCs and MVPs.
• Scale through partners, acting as liaison between the partner and team and facilitating partner resources and processes; supporting partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams.
• Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering team to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.
• Maintain and grow expertise in cloud migration, keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the technical community.

Customer Centricity

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders. Receives and synthesizes data about customer/partner business and technical requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves those solutions' capability and value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Contributes to and understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by partnering with the appropriate internal teams and resources to deliver customer outcomes. Supports customer skilling by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer readiness by facilitating technical discussions and enabling operational health and cloud readiness. Assesses and transfers knowledge to close customer skill gaps.
• Guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Supports definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Anticipates customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs and executes strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation.
• Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction, presents insights and alternatives, and takes action appropriately.

Business Impact

• Drives customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementations (e.g., by application of technical capabilities). Routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party. Applies broad business and technical knowledge across various architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Shapes and enhances customers' requirements.
• Proactively uses knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs. Contributes to increase in consumption and aligns with Customer Success Account Management or other Account Team members on customer/partner priorities to drive growth in consumption via cost optimization, operational excellence performance efficiency, and security. Drives architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer/partner usage and consumption. Ensures that the customer/partner's application has as few points of failure as possible. Consults and provides thought leadership for technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise.
• Understands industry trends and the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.

Technical Leadership

• Proactively develops technical and professional learning and development plan in alignment with and support from their manager. Role models effective technical readiness. Acts as a mentor and role model to less experienced colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts. Participates in development opportunities (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite).
• Shares ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team.
• Generates new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners. Drives opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing, and consumption acceleration. Proactively identifies gaps through delivery and communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance). Applies subject matter expertise to develop new IP that fills identified gaps.

Qualifications

• 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field AND 2+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 3+ year(s) technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR equivalent experience.

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

• 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).