We are seeking an exceptional Cloud Solution Architect Manager to lead and oversee a team of highly skilled Cloud Solution Architects specializing in the Telekom Media & Professional Services Industries (including SAP as a customer) as well as Public Sector & Life Sciences. In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for ensuring the successful implementation of Azure Infrastructure Solutions for our customers within these industries. Furthermore, a significant aspect of your role will involve spearheading SAP on Azure deployments for all our Enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

People Management

Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.

• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.

• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.

• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Customer Centricity

• Provides support and guidance for the team in identifying and evaluating trends (e.g., industry, technology) and gathering customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape) to map architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Represents the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner through escalation across broader teams and with customers, with emphasis on feedback/insights and removing blockers to accelerate value. Coaches team to represent the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services, and supports the team in providing insights across the territory. Drives the team to leverage feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights and influence product roadmaps by presenting business cases to program managers. Shares customer/partner and team member success stories and learnings with the wider internal team.

• Supports and guides team in developing and expanding existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders. Provides coaching on how to build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Provides coaching to help employees facilitate effective customer conversations and prove the capability and value of solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Provides real-time coaching in live customer scenarios to improve team performance and gather insights across customer interactions. Understands how the team's work aligns with customer success plans and enables the team to deliver customer outcomes by driving partnerships with the appropriate internal teams/resources. Builds a strong relationship with peers locally and across the Area by actively participating in account planning, consumption and support planning, and resource planning. Ensures employees are equipped with the capabilities and means to support customer skilling and provide thought leadership in discussions on technical delivery with internal and external stakeholders to influence customer readiness. Seeks out opportunities to contribute to One Microsoft strategies, role modelling collaboration and accountability.

• Coaches team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Drives team to clearly define customer/partner conditions of success. Drives customer health within the territory and accelerates unified support contract coverage where applicable. Anticipates customer dissatisfaction and unmet needs and develops strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation. Coordinates transformative delivery across customers/partners and shares these best practices so others can leverage and scale. Oversees the creation of strategies that improve customer/partner experience.

• Actively listens and acts as a catalyst to create and sustain constructive tension and trust with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures/solutions and approaches. Oversees team to execute customer/partner engagements leveraging the challenger mindset.

Business Impact

• Drives adherence to Microsoft standards and recommended practices by setting expectations for the team around methodology and governance to ensure that the team identifies, communicates, and minimizes business and technical risks. Ensures governance of technical work, including robust architectures that are validated and delivered in line with best practices. Ensures that teams leverage standard tools to maintain accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.

• Drives the team to apply business and technical capabilities in complex customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, propose resolution, and lead removal of technical blockers through regular technical reviews and check-ins to accelerate consumption and solution implementations and customer outcomes. Identifies patterns in blockers across business areas or a territory. Coaches team on best practices for handling escalations.

• Manages the business (e.g., scorecards, forecasting) by delivering against team targets, achieving business metrics, and ensuring the team delivers on Microsoft's Customer Promise. Holds teams accountable for proactively using deep knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and for developing new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Coaches team to lead solution design, resilience reviews, and technical optimization that results in production deployment application and that increases customer/partner usage, consumption, and target metrics. Creates opportunities to expand or accelerate cloud consumption (e.g., through cloud-related managed intellectual property [packaged value-based deliveries]) and coaches the team to lead these customer/partner conversations. Works across teams to seek out and leverage Microsoft insights that strengthen and fuel new commercial growth and consumption. Influences senior and complex partners to grow or scale the business with strategic/high-potential opportunities.

• Provides team with a holistic perspective of customer/partner challenges, industry trends, and competitor architectures to allow team members to engage with customers/partners, demonstrate Microsoft's value, and develop counter strategy.

Technical Leadership

• Fosters a continuous technical self-learning culture and community sharing of stories by encouraging and empowering the team to share learnings, and by establishing a cadence (e.g., internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact the team and other peer teams. Leverages market insights to assist leadership in defining area vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling. Contributes to technical strategy for the business. Role models effective technical readiness and influences team to drive their own technical readiness. Drives and engages others to adapt to changes aligned with solution areas/services priorities, and encourages team to build skills relevant to their market. Acts as a mentor to colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. In partnership with the learning lead, removes blockers to support learning across teams.

• Models how to engage constructively and transparently with the technical and/or business community locally and globally. Participates in management communities (e.g., manager excellence community) to evolve adaptive engines of change and foster a culture of fast and effective learning at all levels. Provides coaching to enable team members to lead virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft. Fosters collaboration across teams (e.g., account teams, product teams) and solution area communities. Drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through technical and business presentations and engagements with internal and external audiences.

• Accelerates innovation by coaching teams on building and/or modifying intellectual properties (IPs) rooted in domain expertise and/or industry acumen. Coaches the team to connect gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing IP, technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers/partners, and drives opportunities for IP reuse and best practice sharing. Manages contributions to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Drives strategy for new IP and collaborates with managed intellectual property (packaged deliveries), Design, and Governance to improve existing IP.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND extended years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.

• First years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, and/or technical architect managers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in working with SAP technologies and/or in customer-facing roles in SAP projects

• Previous experience in a Customer Success Role

• Proven experience in leading and managing teams of Cloud Solution Architects or similar roles.

• Strong background in cloud computing, particularly with Azure Infrastructure Solutions and SAP deployments on Azure.

• In-depth knowledge of the Telekom Media & Professional Services Industries, including their unique challenges and requirements.

• Knowledge of the Public Sector & Life Sciences sectors, including unique challenges and requirements is beneficial.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, enabling effective collaboration with both team members and customers.

• Demonstrated ability to drive successful cloud solution implementations, meeting timelines and exceeding customer expectations.

• Technical expertise in cloud architecture and related technologies, with a passion for staying ahead of industry advancements.

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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .