Job Description

At Small Medium Enterprises and Channel (SME&C), we are leading a high-growth, AI-powered global sales team—one that is deeply connected to our partners and driven by customer success. By uniting our Small Medium Business, Corporate, Strategy, and Partner teams, we are unlocking the largest customer opportunity, backed by the industry’s most significant investments. Leveraging the power of AI and our extensive partner ecosystem, we are redefining how businesses of all sizes adopt technology to drive growth and innovation. SME&C is more than a sales organization—it’s a culture of innovation, opportunity, and inclusivity. Here, you’ll be part of a diverse, high-performing, and customer-obsessed team where collaboration, connection, and continuous learning fuel everything we do. If you thrive in a fast-paced, digital-first environment and are eager to make a meaningful impact, explore how SME&C can be the next step in your career. Together, we are shaping the future of business.





Do you love working with customers to achieve their business outcomes? Would you love to build expertise around the leading, next generation cloud services?



This is an opportunity to join the SME&C EMEA team as a Cloud & AI Platform CSA for Azure Infrastructure to support the German-speaking markets.



In this role you will proactively act as the voice of the customer/partner and internal communities leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. Identifies and/or translates customer/partner problems into industry solutions. Drives self and guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Proactively identifies, escalates, and mitigates blockers using appropriate tools. Delivers solutions in line with company methodologies, ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed. Proactively identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion at scale. Operates according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record. Leverages market insights and demand signals. Contributes to leading virtual teams using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Proactively identifies gaps that enable solutions to scale across customers.



The base salary for this position starts from EUR 77,200 per annum depending on experience.



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.

Responsibilities

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Business Impact:
Operates according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Collaborates across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction. Proactively manages business and technical risks, adapts methodology and applies governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Continuously prioritizes among competing demands in their work and identifies where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.

Delivers solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage. Guides customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities. Provides feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.

Proactively identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Actively listens to and respectfully challenges customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements. Identifies, and evaluates industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Proactively captures opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.
Proactively identifies, escalates, and mitigates blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption. Applies business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.
Customer Centricity:
Proactively acts as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and internal communities leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. Identifies patterns of feedback across customers/partners/territories/industries and leverages them to develop strategic and actionable insights. Presents business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.

Identifies and/or translates customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, and explains why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings. Proactively helps the customer/partner adopt and use Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions. Builds relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs), and helps build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Independently interacts as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required.

Drives self and guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Defines customer/partner conditions of success by leveraging an understanding of customer goals. Anticipates and addresses customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and executes strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
Partner Specialization:
Identifies and prioritizes several opportunities that align with revenue goals, and orchestrates growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners. Provides assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.

Understands solution area-specific market opportunities (e.g., competitor insights) and collaborates with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) business stakeholders to lead and execute initiatives to translate opportunities into actions. Proactively guides and supports partners in developing repeatable offerings, practices, products, and solutions. Advises the partner throughout initial strategic customer implementations.
Technical Leadership:
Leverages market insights and demand signals to assist leadership in identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling and/or accreditations based on demand. Role models technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influences team to drive their own technical readiness. Acts as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices.

Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP (both existing and new), technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale across customers. Contributes to the development and modification of Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies. Provides thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the local level.

Contributes to leading virtual teams (v-teams) around technologies and customer/partner challenges, and shares ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Demonstrates strong industry knowledge and increases recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to and sometimes leading presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite) Contributes to intellectual property (IP) and identifies patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models. Participates in external technical and non-technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams.

Qualifications

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Required/minimum qualifications:German language fluency. Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND extensive 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. Cloud & AI Platform Infrastructure deep technical experience.

A strong focus on below is required:

Infrastructure & Platform Expertise

Virtual Machines (VMs)

– Windows and Linux

Networking

– VNETs, VPNs, ExpressRoute, Load Balancers, Network Security Groups

Storage

– Blob, Disk, File, Backup, Recovery Services Vault

Identity & Access Management

– Azure Active Directory, RBAC, Conditional Access

Security

– Defender for Cloud, Key Vault, Azure Policy, Sentinel

Hybrid Cloud

– Azure Arc, on-premises integration, VMware, and Hyper-V

Containers & Infra as Code

– AKS, Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates

Monitoring & Management

– Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights

Architecture & Design

Cloud-based solution architecture (IaaS and PaaS) Azure Well-Architected Framework Cloud Adoption Framework Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)

DevOps & Automation

Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions PowerShell, CLI, Ansible CI/CD pipelines and automation scripting

Certifications

Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

Additional or preferred qualifications:Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND extensive 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND extensive experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience. Experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external). Experience working on technical projects. Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications). Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.



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.