As a Solution Engineer, you will proactively engage customers, understand their business and technical challenges, and lead technical conversations that demonstrate the value of Microsoft solutions. You will drive customer success by securing technical wins, influencing solution strategy, and providing expert guidance across both core and adjacent technologies.
In this role, you will collaborate closely with partners, sales teams, and engineering organizations to deliver customer outcomes. You will identify partner capability gaps, support technical readiness, gather competitive insights, and provide strategic recommendations that shape account plans and solution strategies. Your expertise will help strengthen customer trust, accelerate adoption of Microsoft technologies, and contribute valuable market feedback to product and engineering teams.
Responsibilities
Build Strategy
- Works with account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor Microsoft messaging to audience using knowledge of customer feedback, specific Microsoft solutions, and their context in a competitive landscape. Where applicable, builds consumption plans with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.
- Captures core competitive knowledge and delivers back to product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop compete strategies for assigned customers.
- Provides strategic, technical, and partner input based on Microsoft capability at the account level to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner, competitor, or open-source knowledge.
Education
- Monitors and responds to internal tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area.
- Demonstrates new and updated products to increase internal virtual teams' understanding of solutions and new opportunities, emphasizing continuous security enhancement and regulatory compliance.
- Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.
Leverage Partner Ecosystem
- Supports partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams (e.g., Global Partner Solutions).
- Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by acting as liaison between the partner and team and facilitating partner resources and processes throughout the course of the project.
Scale Customer Engagements
- Leverages foundational knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU]) and proactively engages product teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate blockers by conveying impact.
- Uses knowledge of customer context, solution or portfolio expertise, and technical and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers and act as a trusted advisor to assess and consult on their security needs.
- Engages with and reaches out to customers proactively and independently.
- Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended 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]). Searches for customer references to use in engagements.
Solution Design and Proof
- Presents and applies architecture patterns to partners or customers and drives cross-workload support for Microsoft Solutions.
- Applies sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team in addressing customer digital transformation, underscoring security improvements and leveraging insights to align new or changing technology to customer business needs.
- Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions) of products, services, and integration through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment.
Qualifications
Required/minimum qualifications
- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.
Additional or preferred qualifications
- 6+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
- 4+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
- Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. 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 with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
