Cloud Solution Architect

International Customer Success Unit (iCSU) brings scale, agility, and cross solution coverage to our largest, most strategic Global Account customers in their international downstream locations outside of headquarters. We operate out of key geographic locations around the world enabling global execution of our customer’s digital transformation strategies. We bring a seamless customer experience that crosses functional and geographic boundaries empowering customers to realize the business value of their investments in our technology.

The CSA role is responsible for driving customer satisfaction in adopting and effective use of Microsoft’s cloud platforms, consumption, growth with using the array of Cloud services, and the governance of delivery for their portfolio of accounts.

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect - SAP. This customer-facing position is a technical commercial role spanning pre and post sales stages with a focus on customer success.

As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft Azure customer base. You will work with select customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers. You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, ensuring technical blockers are removed on adoption.

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**:
**Scale Customer Engagements**
- Engages with customer technical decision makers and anticipates customer needs and issues proactively through data gathering.
- Uses knowledge of customer context and solution or portfolio expertise to build credibility with customers individually or at scale. Develops technical and market/industry knowledge.
- Ensures technical wins for core technologies by driving technical discussions with customers. Improves customer interactions through feedback and observation.
- Engages other internal resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center, demo sites, virtual sites), mapping out and leveraging foundational resource knowledge for key areas of technology as needed to overcome technical blockers on assigned technology set.

**Scale Through Partners**
- Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by contributing to the facilitation of technical engagements and partnering with colleagues to manage the sales process.

**Build Strategy**
- Shares competitive insights from customer sessions with colleagues and escalates/resolves competitive situations to influence compete strategies.
- Provides strategic, technical input based on Microsoft capability to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner and internal teams.
- Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC) by driving new feedback, blockers, insights, resource (e.g., OneList) items across communities so they can be added and prioritized.
- Works with account teams to tailor Microsoft messaging to audience and captures and shares customer feedback using knowledge of specific Microsoft solutions and their context in a competitive landscape.
- Collaborates with team members to monitor and analyze customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customer’s business outcomes. Identifies opportunities to promote usage.

**Solution Design and Proof**
- Identifies and applies existing demonstration assets. Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions [ADS], proof of concept [POC] sessions) of solutions based on specific Microsoft products through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment. Reviews partner demonstrations and provides feedback to ensure alignment with Microsoft standards.
- Presents and applies reference architectures across technologies/solution areas to partners or customers for their technology sets.
- Expands awareness of and begins practicing digital transformation sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales).

**Technical Leadership**
- Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.
- Conducts group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, Webinars) or leverages existing scale enablement programs to present and educate customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits across Micro