Solution Engineer Manager - Azure

Join Retail and Consumer Goods as an Soulution Engineer Manager - Azure who Synthesizes business insights and orchestrates global teams across the organization to deliver alternative solutions while applying deep expertise and thought leadership. Acts as a "virtual Chief Technical Officer" to provide Account Thought leadership, leverage deep knowledge of Microsoft's solutions, industry, and customer needs, and acts as the voice of the customer, industry, and team. Leads technology strategy formulation by leading alignment of customer needs and technology solutions, execution of technology strategy/digital transformation, creation of mid- to long-term technical roadmaps, and translation of customer business objectives. Develops and drives opportunities, presents opportunities to the customer, and creates demand. Coaches peers on how to create and maintain an opportunity initiation and how to map Microsoft priorities to opportunities. Leads digital transformation using corporate and cross-industry resources, and partners with line-of-business leader or experienced executive to articulate the benefits of Microsoft technology over competitor solutions. Helps customer technical specialists sell Microsoft offerings. Maps technical customer requirements and business scenarios to Microsoft technology platforms. Orchestrates necessary teams and partners to ensure demand generation and establishes proven practices for account planning. Delivers regular industry/technology briefings to customer technology lead decision-makers technical teams. Uses readiness resources and demonstrates expertise in creating enablement plans.

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.

Responsibilities:

Build Strategy

• Generates new compete strategies and builds driven knowledge of team by enabling driven learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Enables team to share compete knowledge with internal teams and global communities, influence compete strategies, and highlight Microsoft advantages during architecture and capability discussions. Acts as a subject matter expert on a particular driven discipline(s).
• Coaches and provides support to team and across internal teams to define and execute strategy. Drives repeatability of strategy. Proactively approaches customers to understand and identify global/cross-area strategy opportunities, aligning strategy with industry insights. Engages internal teams to ensure capability to execute strategy.
• Maintains communications with internal partners (e.g., Account Technology Unit [ATU], Customer Service Unit [CSU] manager, SSM) on highest potential customers to pre-align technical resources to customer and customer cases based on account planning and priorities, with the flexibility to realign to minimize orchestration and enable proactive engagements as needed.
• Works with global account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor to audience for the global or area markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the driven landscape, broader market trends, and in-depth industry knowledge. Prepares teams for future market and opportunities. Ensures execution of compete strategy across teams, collaborating with cross-functional groups as needed. Where applicable, directs teams in the building of consumption plans with complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.

Education

• Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing proven practices (e.g., architectures, materials) and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events (e.g., TechReady). Provides insight into how to identify and win opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding and capabilities.
• Ensures team members participate in tech communities and drives feedback to improve overall team member experience and effectiveness at global level.
• Enables and empowers team to develop technical expertise and provide technical insights to internal teams. Acts as a role model by increasing own technical knowledge and serving as a respected technology leader to broader organization. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

• Maximizes national/international-level capacity and capabilities and influences future potential partner models by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps, and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams). Raises escalations or alleviates blockers through collaboration with manager-level counterparts in cross-functional groups.
• Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build global strategy.

Scale Customer Engagements

• Leverages in-depth knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU]) and owns resolution of highly complex, escalated technical and non-technical blockers by engaging other teams (e.g., engineering, Account Team Unit [ATU], Specialist Team Unit [STU]) and conveying impact. Leverages insights and knowledge of blockers to anticipate market needs and contribute to global strategy. Identifies patterns of blockers within area of expertise and reaches out across geos to consolidate patterns into a business case to accelerate escalation.
• Acts as a representative for technology domain to all C-suite leaders within local market while engaging with and leveraging local Microsoft exprienced leadership as appropriate. Coaches and enables team to identify and proactively engage with key customer technical decision makers and influencers to unblock technical and business obstacles.
• Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions, and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging deep knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds). Aligns goals across workloads and facilitates cross-selling with various worldwide teams.
• Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagement and drive long-term global strategy through global capacity planning, prioritization, and utilization of resources. Proactively plans team resources and engages corporate teams to influence maturation and presales. Qualifies and prioritizes opportunities, and holds team accountable for maximizing selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy.
• Uses broad, in-depth industry, technical, and professional knowledge, and leadership skills to build credibility with customers and is sought after for expertise.
• Ensures consistency and quality through capturing, sharing, and adherence of standards and proven practices in customer engagements by scaling implementation of cross-functional initiatives across channels at the global level to drive consistency in technical approach and ensure customer technical experience across teams.

Solution Design and Proof

• Coaches team to envision new and innovative solutions that use Microsoft technology to meet customer needs. Supports team in coordinating with other stakeholders to develop solutions for complex sales scenarios. Ensures subsidiary level capabilities to execute on those solutions.
• Applies advanced sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team to lead and inspire global customers in digital transformation solutions and shape and enable scalable change across subsidiaries.
• Promotes leveraging of reference architectures and provides validation input to establish programmatic frameworks for use by the business.
• Oversees highly complex demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions, pilots, hackathons) of end-to-end Microsoft solutions and architectures based on multiple products and positions solutions against competitors. Ensures demonstrations enable customers to identify and resolve technical issues with clear criteria and next steps that guarantee deployment of Microsoft technology.
• Identifies new technical and business trends and needs, and identifies ideas that can be transformed into solutions that benefit customers/partners, serving as the voice of the customer (VOC) to Microsoft. Ensures input is utilized and solutions for the customer are established at the worldwide level.

Other

Embody our Culture and Values

Qualifications:

Required/minimum qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 10+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• 3+ years people management experience (including leading virtual teams).

Other Requirements:

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role's job duties.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 10+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• 5+ years people management experience (including leading virtual teams).
• 5+ years of experience in the Retail & Consumer Goods industry or a related industry.

Solution Engineering M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $155,800 - $277,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $202,400 - $303,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: ;br>
Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 11, 2025.

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. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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.

#MCAPSA