Senior Partner Solution Architect - Security

Senior Partner Solution Architect - Security

Microsoft has a dynamic and influential partner ecosystem that plays a critical role in driving growth and delivering successful outcomes for customers. The ecosystem includes a wide range of partners, from global strategic ISVs to industry-specific ISVs; global, regional, and local Systems Integration partners; Advisory firms and Microsoft Channel Partners. These partners bring a wealth of expertise, solutions, and services to the table, powered by the Microsoft Cloud, helping customers to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem is constantly evolving, with a focus on driving growth and profitability for Microsoft and our partners and successful business outcomes for customers. Microsoft makes significant investments into our partner ecosystem to ensure that we have a world class ecosystem partnering with us to drive mutual customer success. Now, more than ever, our partners are critical to our ability to help our customers transform leveraging the power of AI. 

Microsoft Enterprise Partner Sales (EPS) is the commercial organization accountable for driving Microsoft’s growth and success for Enterprise customers through our partner ecosystem. We define and execute our global partner ecosystem strategy, focused on the end-to-end partner lifecycle, such that together we can deliver our customers digital transformation goals.

As a Partner Solutions Architect - Security, we are looking for you to bring your work ethic, enthusiasm, optimism, and passion to foster profound growth and change within our partner ecosystem. You will leverage your challenger mindset, technology and cybersecurity knowledge, market insights, understanding of the competitive landscape, and best in class interpersonal skills to grow our robust ecosystem of world class partners enabling them to bring market-defining solutions to our customers.

Responsibilities

Business Impact

• Leads the adoption of Microsoft Security offerings based on analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).
• Drives their team in operating and optimizing complex and high-impact situations for strategic customers/partners in collaboration with internal stakeholders.
• Anticipates and manages business and technical risks, and adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks.
• Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions.
• Applies broad business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints. Shapes and enhances customers' requirements.
• Proactively uses deep knowledge of the offerings, practices, products, services, solutions, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and to propose and coach others to develop new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios.
• Strategic Sales Enablement by activating transformational deals, providing architectural guidance, resolving technical blockers, and enhancing solution design. Your work will directly contribute to workload consumption and revenue impact.
• Provides thought leadership to help drive technical solution clarity, design, development, and deployment (including with and through partner technical stakeholders).
• Empower innovation through technical innovation workshops, tech briefings, and envisioning sessions to build technical intensity across partner teams. By collaborating with engineering and product teams, you’ll help accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies and shape partner offerings that align with both business goals and technical requirements.
• Champion technical excellence guiding partners through architecture design sessions, proof-of-concepts, and MVP builds. You’ll ensure that solutions follow Microsoft’s Cloud and AI best practices and are optimized for performance, scalability, and security.
• Thought Leadership & Stakeholder Management, building long-term engagements with our strategic partners, influencing their adoption of Microsoft security technologies; developing deep technical relationships with CXOs and fostering executive alignment to support joint success.
• Partner Enablement & Business Acumen coaching partner technical teams to ensure pre-sales, deployment, and consumption are embedded in solution development. You’ll help partners build resilience to technical challenges, navigate competitive landscapes, and translate technical concepts into business value.

Partner Centricity

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders (to the extent that the customer/partner will call for consultation without being prompted).
• Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer/partner business, complex technical requirements and issues (e.g., involving great length or tenacity to resolve), and various technical strategies being proposed.
• Addresses requirements/issues/strategies with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Acts as the voice of the partner by seeking feedback, insights, and identifying resources across territories to add and prioritize.
• Identifies and directs attention to multiple, strategic opportunities (e.g., launch deals) that align with revenue goals, and orchestrates growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners.
• Leads assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific, complex opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.
• Understands and anticipates solution area-specific market opportunities (e.g., competitor insights) and proactively leads initiatives to address them by supporting, assembling, and leading a v-team.
• Influences, challenges, and supports partners in developing scalable offerings, practices, products, and solutions, and investing and adopting new technologies at scale of the customer.
• Maintains active visibility in solution area-specific communities both to build credibility in internal/partner work and information sharing (e.g., technical updates, public facing roadmap) and to influence partners.
• Collaborates with internal stakeholders (e.g., engineering, sales) to provide field-based insights related to products/solutions related to functioning, pricing, implementation, and other areas.

Technical Leadership

• Leads and may assemble virtual teams around security 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 using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape.
• Demonstrates deep cybersecurity knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings across internal teams.
• Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing partner intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable our security solutions to scale across customers/partner. Drives consumption acceleration, as well as IP reuse and best practice sharing. Develops and contributes to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies.
• Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance), and leveraging business experience to prioritize efforts.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 7+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure/cybersecurity technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.

 Additional or preferred qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure/cybersecurity 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, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure/cybersecurity technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 6+ years experience leading technical projects.
• Technical Certification(s) in Cloud Security or Cybersecurity Technology(ies).

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.

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