Empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. That is what inspires us, drives our work, and pushes us to challenge the status quo every day. Embracing our cloud-first strategy, we deliver solutions that are optimized for the world and enable customers to drive their business more successfully. Margin Strategy and Investment Optimization (MSIO) Finance is an exciting and fast-evolving finance team at the forefront of Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy. We are looking for a talented and motivated individual to help shape the future of our cloud products.

This team’s charter is to use the insight of first party customer usage to increase efficiencies across our cloud infrastructure.  As a critical member of the team, you will support both short and long-term initiatives that drive down costs, test our technology, and keep Microsoft Cloud ahead of the competition, while enhancing transparency into cloud infrastructure investments, and safeguarding shareholder value.

Responsibilities

Prioritize

Contributes to analysis of present and future financial performance of various products, segments or other businesses. Assists more senior team members to conduct analysis and research studies of financial plans, acquisition activity, and future opportunities.

Assists in the execution of annual business planning and forecasting process.  Gathers insight and contributes to analysis and research to support preliminary and adjusted forecast cycles.

Provides support to peers and counterparts during financial close periods.  Prepares recurring financial reporting, forecasts, and presentations, and updates as necessary through the reporting cycles. Determines financial results (e.g., revenue, profitability, OPEX) compared to expected budget and projections. Identifies variances to provide insights to management and inform future projections.

Partnership

Serves as Finance contact for partners for all revenue, expense, and compliance questions related to reporting and analysis. Contributes insights for financial plans, variance analysis, resource optimization, investments, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), long range planning, and driving margin accountability. Manages and executes processes through engagement with internal and external stakeholders.

Learns and applies the foundational aspects of Microsoft Finance (e.g., financial systems, policies and procedures, key metrics, historical performance, reporting and forecast requirements) and business (e.g., monetization strategy, market, key drivers of profitability) to collect information, perform technical analysis and modeling, and complete standardized reporting. Understands strategies to proactively mitigate, or reactively address, potential adverse effects of macroeconomic and/or geopolitical risks, and proposes solutions.

Assembles and summarizes data through data mining and business intelligence to structure reports and financial models for decision support.  Leverages statistical analysis, predictive analytics and financial modeling techniques to conduct sophisticated analyses. Acts as subject-matter-expert for data management and operations. Understands history of data procurement, location, methods, issues, and actions taken.

Improves current methods used in collecting data, developing automated financial reporting and forecasting tools, and creating standard and ad-hoc reports. Learns how advanced technology is leveraged in Finance and across Microsoft to provide greater depth of analysis. 

Communicates recurring and ad-hoc results in a logical and understandable message.

Protect

Ensures compliance with company policies, legal standards, and regulatory requirements by reviewing and monitoring accuracy of financial documents and business processes. Drives corrective measures. Supports questions regarding documentation, policy adherence, and requirements. Recommends approved instruments and processes.  Remains current on all company policies and procedures and updates others.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Data Science, or related field AND 2+ years of post-graduate financial analysis, accounting, controllership, or finance work experience

OR Master's Degree in Business Administration, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Data Science, or related field

OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Strong analytical skills, financial modeling capabilities and strategic thinking

Self-starter who thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with evolving technology and business model trends

Ability to communicate complex analysis in a simple way. Executive level oral and written communication skills.

Proven leadership skills, with demonstrated results in proactively driving and delivering high value/high-impact project results through both individual and v-team efforts

Strong partnering capabilities, with the ability to influence others without direct authority and appropriately push back when required

Comfort working at multiple altitudes, from strategic/high-level projects to detailed COGS analysis

Ability to handle multiple tasks under tight deadlines, quickly prioritize for impact and the resourcefulness to deliver

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.