Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.

With over 15,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience and Success (CEnS) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of the Microsoft end-to-end customer experience. This newly expanded organization reflects the Microsoft ambition to be known as a customer experience company, ensuring our Microsoft mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is enabled by delighting customers and consistently exceeding their expectations in every interaction through a connected customer experience.

Microsoft has a tremendous opportunity to exceed customer expectations and drive greater customer loyalty and trust, which leads to greater satisfaction, retention, and growth. The CEnS organization is looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success to help us build a future where customers come to us, not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, and also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience that is rooted in our commitment to delivering on customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

Title: Partner Technical Consultant – Azure Infra (IaaS)

Partner Technical Consultant (PTCs) cultivate the Microsoft Partner relationship by facilitating the delivery of technical consultation services to enable our partners. The PTCs focus on supporting technical presales and deployment scenarios, driving skills transfer/enablement and adoption of Microsoft products and solutions to help with the partner business.

Primary Responsibility and Tasks:

• Provide starter consultation as a foundational service that provides introductory guidance to partners. This includes the fundamentals of starting a practice or expanding to a new workload. It is designed for partners who wish to attain an initial understanding of a Priority Scenarios, to expand their capabilities, and to incorporate new Technical Scenarios. Starter Consultations are not associated with an active customer engagement, but rather, increase a partner’s ability to capture opportunities to build, sell or deploy new cloud solutions.

• Provide presales consultations for partners as they work to pitch and close a sales opportunity. This can include defining a value proposition, providing cost estimates, managing customer objections, responding to competitor messaging, demonstrating technical solutions, initiating a technical proof-of-concept in a lab, and architecture planning and design leading to a Statement of Work.

• Provide deployment consultations to assist partners as they plan and implement solutions for their customers or develop applications. This includes architecture planning and design guidance, best practices and deployment guidance, product references and documentation. A Deployment Consultation provides deployment guidance to help partner deploy the solution and to shadow the deployment and provide best practices, helping remove deployment blockers through recommended architecture guidance.

• Provide advanced consultation to deep dive for complex solutions. It can explore solutions crossing multiple solution areas or requiring cross-discipline product expertise. These solutions can be tied to a specific focus, such as security practices optimization, or where products require custom settings or configurations. Advanced Consultations can include technical documentation, customized demos, code samples, complex automation guidance, solution scaling advice and technical resources for customized reporting and monitoring scenarios.

Qualifications

Technical Qualifications:

• Understand and drive Microsoft Cloud deployment and adoption, working with Partners directly to drive success with Microsoft Azure Infrastructure (IaaS) management and deployment: Virtual Machines, Storage, Networking.

• Good knowledge on Hybrid scenarios. Experience with VPN gateways (Site-to-Site and Point-to-Site) connectivity with ExpressRoute.

• Good knowledge on Business Continuity (Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery).

• Good knowledge on Cloud Identity and Federation (Azure Active Directory, ADFS).

• Strong knowledge on Microsoft Windows Server and Hyper-V.

• Knowledge of some advanced Azure workloads would be a plus (WVD/RedHat/SAP in Azure)

• Basic Programming skills in PowerShell (Windows and Azure modules), JSON templates, runbooks, Python would be a plus.

• Any experience with other Cloud Providers and Open Source platforms and technologies would be useful.

• Customer and Partner Focus: Demonstrated skills and abilities to consistently create an amazingly positive experience for Partners.

• Change management: Articulate product strategic direction along with its business benefits and empower partners in embracing the change.

• Full professional proficiency of English language both verbal & written. Any languages from the followings are a plus: Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French, Russian, Korean, Chinese & Japanese.

• Must be willing to work the nightshift on Americas Time Zone (8 AM – 5 PM EST)

Business Qualifications

• Ability to confidently deliver solution guidance.

• Capable of building and sustaining strong technical relationships as a trusted advisor.

• Must have the ability to collaborate across multiple teams.

• Must possess strong Active Listening Skills.

• Ability to analyze and drive to root cause of a problem.

• Previous experience in a consulting position helpful.

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.