This role has people management responsibilities including driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance. Acts as a representative for technology domain to all C-suite leaders within local market while engaging with and leveraging local Microsoft senior leadership as appropriate. Uses broad knowledge to build credibility with customers and is sought after for expertise. Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions, and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging deep knowledge of processes. Leverages in-depth knowledge of resources. Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagement and drive long-term global strategy through global capacity planning, prioritization, and utilization of resources. Maximizes national/international-level capacity and capabilities and influences future potential partner models by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps, and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem. Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build global strategy. Generates new compete strategies and builds competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Coaches and provides support to team and across internal teams to define and execute strategy.

Engaging with customers and guiding them through technical decisions related to the purchase and use of Microsoft technology. Providing expertise and insights to help customers make informed decisions that align with their technology goals.

What will be expected from you as a successful Solution Engineer Manager on Cloud & AI:

Advising customer technical decision:

• Business Knowledge >> The ability to appreciate the technical nature of the business, as well as how a particular function relates to that industry and the competition.
• Competitive Analysis >> The ability to identify competitors and evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of products, services, marketing, and other areas. This includes an ability to gather intelligence and interpret it for the purposes of business decisions.
• Consultative Selling >> The ability to understand customer needs through dialogue before recommending products/services.
• Driving Insight-Led Conversations >> The ability to bring a differentiated, tailored point of view to customer or partner conversations that create a valuable purchase experience for the customer/partner.
• Strategic Technical Planning >> The ability to map the company's products and solutions to customer modernization and digital transformation plans in order to drive business outcomes.
• Technical Communication >> The ability to adapt communications around different technologies, products, and services to the audience's level of understanding.
• Technical Sales >> The ability to explain Microsoft's products and services to customers and identify opportunities for customers to grow their business. Coach team to set the right tension to increase velocity of sales & project implementation.
• Technology Industry Knowledge >> Knowledge of trends, direction, new products, and changes in the technology as it applies to a particular area of focus, as well as specific knowledge about hardware, software, and services.

Building Stakeholder Relationships:

• Building and nurturing strong, long-term relationships with clients and stakeholders to foster trust and enhance customer satisfaction.

Demonstrating Microsoft Solution c apabilities

• Demonstrating the capabilities of Microsoft solutions effectively to showcase their value to customers. Applying technical architectures to client scenarios, illustrating how Microsoft technology can address their unique challenges, and collaborating with partners in sell-with scenarios to leverage the partner ecosystem.

Readiness for Deployment:

• Serving as a contact point for technical resources, both within the organization and externally through partners. Proactively supporting readiness of clients for implementation and supporting resolution of blockers or challenges to that readiness in order to ensure that customer needs are met.

Sales/Pre-Sales Acumen & management skills:

• Sales & Pre-Sales Leadership >> Demonstrates strong commercial acumen by aligning technical strategy with business outcomes. Coaches the team to identify and qualify opportunities, accelerate deal velocity, and contribute to revenue growth through effective technical storytelling and value articulation.
• Customer-Centric Storytelling: Coaches team members to craft compelling narratives that connect Microsoft solutions to customer challenges, using storytelling techniques to simplify complex technical concepts and inspire decision-makers.
• Executive Communication: Equips the team to confidently engage with C-level stakeholders, tailoring technical messaging to business priorities and ensuring clarity, relevance, and impact in every interaction.
• Insight-Driven Engagements: Encourages the use of customer insights and industry trends to shape differentiated value propositions, enabling consultative conversations that drive trust and influence.
• Sales Enablement & Collaboration: Partners closely with account teams to co-develop strategic account plans, ensuring technical resources are aligned with sales motions and customer success goals.
• Pre-Sales Excellence: Champions the use of structured pre-sales methodologies (e.g., Challenger, MEDDIC) to guide teams in qualifying opportunities, managing technical objections, and delivering winning demos and proof-of-concepts.
• Execution Management: Be able to ensure your team members own actions and are energized by our mission. Ensure they execute on Technical initiatives and also have excellent CRM Pipeline hygiene.

Responsibilities:

Build Strategy

• Generates new compete strategies and builds competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Enables team to share compete knowledge with internal teams and global communities, influence compete strategies, and highlight Microsoft advantages during architecture and capability discussions. Acts as a subject matter expert on a particular competitive discipline(s).

• Coaches and provides support to team and across internal teams to define and execute strategy. Drives repeatability of strategy. Proactively approaches customers to understand and identify global/cross-area strategy opportunities, aligning strategy with industry insights. Engages internal teams to ensure capability to execute strategy.

• Maintains communications with internal partners (e.g., Account Technology Unit [ATU], Customer Service Unit [CSU] manager, SSM) on highest potential customers to pre-align technical resources to customer and customer cases based on account planning and priorities, with the flexibility to realign to minimize orchestration and enable proactive engagements as needed.

• Works with global account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor to audience for the global or area markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the competitive landscape, broader market trends, and in-depth industry knowledge. Prepares teams for future market and opportunities. Ensures execution of compete strategy across teams, collaborating with cross-functional groups as needed. Where applicable, directs teams in the building of consumption plans with complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.

Education

• Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing best practices (e.g., architectures, materials) and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events (e.g., TechReady). Provides insight into how to identify and win opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding and capabilities.

• Ensures team members participate in tech communities and drives feedback to improve overall team member experience and effectiveness at global level.

• Enables and empowers team to develop technical expertise and provide technical insights to internal teams. Acts as a role model by increasing own technical knowledge and serving as a respected technology leader to broader organization. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

• Maximizes national/international-level capacity and capabilities and influences future potential partner models by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps, and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams). Raises escalations or alleviates blockers through collaboration with manager-level counterparts in cross-functional groups.

• Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build global strategy.

Scale Customer Engagements

• Leverages in-depth knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU]) and owns resolution of highly complex, escalated technical and non-technical blockers by engaging other teams (e.g., engineering, Account Team Unit [ATU], Specialist Team Unit [STU]) and conveying impact. Leverages insights and knowledge of blockers to anticipate market needs and contribute to global strategy. Identifies patterns of blockers within area of expertise and reaches out across geos to consolidate patterns into a business case to accelerate escalation.

• Acts as a representative for technology domain to all C-suite leaders within local market while engaging with and leveraging local Microsoft senior leadership as appropriate. Coaches and enables team to identify and proactively engage with key customer technical decision makers and influencers to unblock technical and business obstacles.

• Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions, and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging deep knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds). Aligns goals across workloads and facilitates cross-selling with various worldwide teams.

• Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagement and drive long-term global strategy through global capacity planning, prioritization, and utilization of resources. Proactively plans team resources and engages corporate teams to influence maturation and presales. Qualifies and prioritizes opportunities, and holds team accountable for maximizing selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy.

• Uses broad, in-depth industry, technical, and professional knowledge, and leadership skills to build credibility with customers and is sought after for expertise.

• Ensures consistency and quality through capturing, sharing, and adherence of standards and best practices in customer engagements by scaling implementation of cross-functional initiatives across channels at the global level to drive consistency in technical approach and ensure customer technical experience across teams.

Solution Design and Proof

• Coaches team to envision new and innovative solutions that use Microsoft technology to meet customer needs. Supports team in coordinating with other stakeholders to develop solutions for complex sales scenarios. Ensures subsidiary level capabilities to execute on those solutions.

• Applies advanced sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team to lead and inspire global customers in digital transformation solutions and shape and enable scalable change across subsidiaries.

• Promotes leveraging of reference architectures and provides validation input to establish programmatic frameworks for use by the business.

• Oversees highly complex demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and pilot & proof of concept [POC] sessions, pilots, hackathons) of end-to-end Microsoft solutions and architectures based on multiple products and positions solutions against competitors. Ensures demonstrations enable customers to identify and resolve technical issues with clear criteria and next steps that guarantee deployment of Microsoft technology.

• Identifies new technical and business trends and needs, and identifies ideas that can be transformed into solutions that benefit customers/partners, serving as the voice of the customer (VOC) to Microsoft. Ensures input is utilized and solutions for the customer are established at the worldwide level.

Qualifications:

Required/minimum qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 10+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 10+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• 3+ years people management experience (including leading virtual teams).

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. 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 .

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