Technology Specialist

at  Microsoft

Are you passionate about helping customers transform their businesses? Microsoft is at the forefront of this transformation; come and help organizations rethink aspects of their business in a way that sets them and their people up for success.
The main goal of a Microsoft Technology Specialist (TS) is to win the technical decision of customers to purchase and use Microsoft technology and cloud services. The TS is expected to both own and win customers’ technical decisions, as well as find new opportunities through their contacts and engagements for Sales Specialists to pursue. As a TS, you work within a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to help educate your customers at a technical level, demonstrate, and prove our solutions, and win the technical decision. Being part of this team will allow you to maintain and develop your deep technical expertise across Microsoft and non-Microsoft cloud-based technologies.
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.

REQUIRED/MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Several years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND multiple years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND multiple years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience

ADDITIONAL OR PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Azure Certifications: Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104) or Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (Exam AZ-305)
• Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of competitor cloud migration platforms, infrastructure and services including hybrid cloud technologies.
• Partners: Experience leveraging partner solutions to solve customer needs and scale opportunities.
• Experience creating cloud migration Proof of Concepts (PoC), Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers that lead to production deployments.
• Collaborative: Works cohesively with customers, the Microsoft account team, and Microsoft partners. Helps others succeed by identifying and promoting innovative solutions and strategies.
• Excellent Communicator: Demonstrates executive presence, presentation skills, deep technical product demo abilities, written and verbal communication skills.
• Deep domain knowledge in Data Center Migration, Windows Server, and SQL Server Migration (including modernization to PaaS), VMware, Networking, Security, Storage, BCDR, Infra as Code, Hybrid and Arc, or hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.
• Relationship Building: Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior executives. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. The ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.
• Fluent in German and English (written and verbal)
  Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations

Key Responsibilities:

• Own technical discussions for Azure Migration 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, resolve concerns, preventing, and removing technical blockers, and validating a strong 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 makers agree with proposed architecture and on the migration plan. Drive POCs and MVPs.
• Scale through partners, acting as liaison between the partner and account team, 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 the 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.
• Support the creation of new pipeline in collaboration with the Specialist.
• Identify new opportunities within customer engagement and hand off to the Solution Specialist for pursuit.
• Be the Trusted advisor and use proactive effort to find and understand customers’ pain points and design and offer solutions (with business case) to technical leaders.
• Be an Azure platform evangelist for Migration scenarios like Hybrid Compute, Backup and DR, Desktop Virtualization, and Specialized Workloads such as AVS and Defender for Cloud.
• Develop customer technical skilling plan in collaboration with customer and account team.