Senior Solution Engineer

Overview

The Senior Solution Engineer proactively identifies and engages with key customer technical decision makers and influencers, while engaging the sales team and helping lead sales strategy. This role uses knowledge of customer context and deep technical, domain, and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers. The Senior Solution Engineer leads and ensures complex technical wins and leverages knowledge of resources. They scale wins through partners in a sell-with environment by promoting the partner within the Microsoft ecosystem. This position supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build subsidiary strategy. The Senior Solution Engineer builds competitive knowledge, documents compete patterns, and shares within the community to drive change and escalations for competitive selling strategies. They proactively develop strategic cross-workload/subsidiary and account-level responses to specific market threats by identifying market patterns and delivering feedback to business groups on trends and needs.

Responsibilities

The role encompasses several key areas:

Build Strategy

• Builds competitive knowledge, documents compete patterns, and shares within the community to drive change and escalations for competitive selling strategies. Acts as a subject matter expert on specific competition. Delivers competitive knowledge back to product and engineering teams.
• Works with local account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans, tailoring to the audience for local markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the competitive landscape, and broader market trends. Where applicable, builds consumption plans with moderately complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.
• Proactively develops strategic cross-workload/subsidiary and account-level responses to specific market threats by identifying market patterns and delivering feedback to business groups on trends and needs.

Education

• Builds readiness plans for peers and proactively identifies gaps and new opportunities for learning. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.
• Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing best practices (e.g., architectures, materials) and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events. Provides insight into how to identify opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding.
• Monitors, responds to, and acts as a thought leader on internal tech community posts, establishes and leads vibrant tech communities including community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor to the community.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

• Scales wins through partner in a sell-with environment by promoting the partner within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams) and developing deep partner relationships.
• Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build subsidiary strategy.

Scale Customer Engagements

• Leverages knowledge of resources and proactively engages product teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate escalated technical blockers by conveying impact and anticipating and addressing future potential blockers based on needs.
• Leads and ensures complex technical wins (e.g., cross-workload, cross-team, cross-geo, subsidiary-level impact) by establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies), coaching others (e.g., technical sellers, account teams), leveraging knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds [ECIFs]). Ensures alignment of Microsoft technologies with future sector standards and requirements by working with industry boards and driving customer case studies and references.
• Proactively identifies and engages with key customer technical decision makers and influencers while engaging sales team and helping lead sales strategy.
• Uses knowledge of customer context, and deep technical, domain, and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.

Solution Design and Proof

• Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions, pilots, hackathons) of solutions based on multiple products and position solutions against competitors. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and programmatic framework for re-use by the business.
• Adapts and extends architecture patterns to accommodate complex customer requirements and drive integration solutions for industry flavor. Delivers assets that can be leveraged by others in the business.
• Applies advanced sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) to guide customers through digital transformation solutions and uses innovation to challenge solutions against changing technology (e.g., Power Apps).

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualification

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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Key skills/competency

• Solution Selling
• Technical Sales
• Customer Engagement
• Sales Strategy
• Partner Management
• Competitive Analysis
• Digital Transformation
• Proof of Concept
• Architecture Design
• Thought Leadership