Come as you are, do what you love!

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.

The Global Partner Solutions team mission is to: build and sell intelligent cloud and intelligent edge solutions with partners, empowering people and organizations to achieve more. GPS is a sales organization accountable for the commercial partner business at Microsoft.

We are looking for a Partner facing Compliance Security Solution Architect to work with our partners to build new and innovative Compliance Security solutions and offers build on the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud platforms.

Responsibilities

Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) play a critical role in working with partners to provide deep technical support through solution build and first mile customer engagements such as Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions (ADS), and Hackathons. The CSAs build relationships with partner technical and development resources, designing and architecting new solutions based on Microsoft’s cloud platform and technologies. They deliver value via a portfolio of service delivery engagements optimized to accelerate partner solution builds and first mile customer wins and stand out as a Technology expert due to deep solutions knowledge. They can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft engineering teams and blackbelts often surfacing product issues, providing feedback and insights that accelerate fixes and updates.

Key areas of responsibility - WHAT CSAs do:

• Understanding Partner Technical Environment. Identifies and evaluates industry trends, and jointly develops technical enablement plan with partner. Maintains technical skills and knowledge of market trends, opportunities, and competitive insights.

• Architecture Design & Deployment. Champions an existing architecture approach, synthesizes data about partner business, applies broad technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge, anticipates technical blockers and adapts methodology to minimize risks.

• Practice Development. Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property, technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions.  

• Trusted Advisor: Develops and expands existing impactful relationships; creates and sustains constructive tension and trust with partner and leads the adoption of Microsoft architecture technologies.  

• Thought Leadership. Leads virtual teams around technologies and partner challenges, participates in external architect community events and shares learnings with internal team; demonstrates deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions.  

• Solutions/Offers/Practices. Leads execution of architectural engagements, such as Technical Briefings, Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions, and Hackathons with the goal of defining and bringing new solutions, offers and/or practices to market.

• Skilling and Best Practice Sharing. Collaborates with Microsoft’s Engineering and Global Black Belt teams on specific skill requirements for partners and the sharing of best practices; Lead and/or contribute to the delivery of workshops, bootcamps, and trainings necessary to build the technical skills and expertise of partners.

• Technical Events & Community Contribution. Attends Digital Transformation/Technology conferences such as Build. Participate in technical panels and user groups, provide insights, and contributes work that is shared across communities.  

Qualifications

Skills and Experience in broad areas of Compliance, Information Protection and Privacy are essential, and experience in Microsoft technologies is a benefit however not essential as cross training from alternative vendors can be provided for the right candidate.

Key Capabilities

• 6-10+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales, technology solutions/practice development, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications

• Understanding Partner Technical Environment. Adept at gathering partner insights and mapping architecture and digital transformation solutions to partner business outcomes. Deep understanding of digital transformation business drivers, cloud platforms, emerging computing trends and their impact on partner practice building opportunities.

• Architecture Design & Deployment. Skilled at proposing and developing high-value solutions to scale across multiple partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios in collaboration with the partner, meeting business and IT requirements and constraints. Experience in enabling a breadth of highly advanced solutions using enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations and technology management that support the partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation, resolving blockers and accelerating consumption while minimizing business and technical risks.

• Practice Development. Skilled in driving sales and consumption, developing and contributing to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Experience and understanding of large-scale security portfolios in enterprise-wide environments.

• Trusted Advisor. Skillfully provides direction to technical decision-makers (TDMs) and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision-makers (BDMs). Knows when to challenge partner decision and/or areas where they might do more and encourages alternative architectures and approaches.

• Thought Leadership. Ability to share strong insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams and internal communities; Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects; ability to solve Partner problems through cloud technologies, leveraging internal and/or external resources.

• 3-5+ years’ experience in one of the deep technical specializations below, with Compliance being key skillsets for this role.

Compliance.

• Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), MIP Scanner, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Endpoint DLP, Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), O365 Customer Lockbox, O365 Data Governance, O365 eDiscovery, 0365 Advanced eDiscovery, O365 Auditing, O365 Advanced Auditing, Insider Risk, Compliance Score, Microsoft Information Governance, Compliance Manager, Communications Compliance. 

Beneficial:

Azure Security. 

• Azure Security Center, Azure Defender, Azure Firewall, DDoS Protection, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Sentinel, Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, Network Security Groups, Secure Score, Defender for IoT.  

• Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Well Architected Framework (WAF), Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), Competitive Product Knowledge, Cybersecurity Systems, Azure Migration, Azure Apps.

Zero Trust Foundations.

• Advanced Audit, Azure Active Directory (AAD), Azure Active Directory Premium (AADP​), Secure Hybrid Access​ (SHA), Secure Access, Hybrid Identity, Cloud Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), Multi-Factor ​Authentication (MFA), ADFS, Microsoft EndPoint Management (MEM), Conditional Access..

• Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Competitive Product Knowledge.

Threat Protection.

• Microsoft Defender for EndPoint, Microsoft Defender for O365, Azure Security Center, Windows Hello, Credential Guard, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), Azure Sentinel, Azure Defender, Azure Information Protection, Office DLP, Azure Key Vault, Threat Management, Defender for IoT..

• Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Competitive Product Knowledge, Cyber Threat Knowledge, Cybersecurity Systems, Threat Hunting, Security Operations.

• Additionally, 2+ years in the following skills are preferred: Competitive Product Knowledge, Regulatory Compliance Knowledge such as GDPR, Regulatory Consulting Experience, ISO 270XX Family, NIST, PCI.

Additionally:

• Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep sales relationships with CXOs and practice building executives in highly strategic ISV (Independent Software Vendor), MSP (Managed Service Provider), and SI (System Integrator) partner types.

• Collaboration. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.

• Communication. Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams. Strong presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences at different levels of organizations.   

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred

• Certification in one or more of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, mobile, cloud security, device security, identity, Microsoft 365, zero trust

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. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.