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 Technology Strategist (PTS), 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 industry knowledge, market insights and understanding of the competitive landscape to work with partners on their enablement of complex solutions, and all-up Microsoft business. **Responsibilities** **Education and Thought Leadership** + Uses existing and new readiness resources and demonstrates expertise in creating enablement plans for partners with complex solutions, and all-up Microsoft business. + Drives innovations to help partners meet capacity and capability goals, maximize reach and impact, and drive long-term engagement and thought leadership on the Microsoft platform, and influences large partners to see and adopt the strategic value. + Provides expertise and is sought out by the Microsoft community because of broad expertise across technologies or solution areas. + Leads the direction that virtual team members (e.g., Account Team) take with Partners and their customers by providing them with strategic input using thorough knowledge of Microsoft technologies, partner accounts, and digital transformations and their context in the competitive landscape. + Coaches the partner on building resilience to technical issues and dealing with competition. **Ensuring Success** + Helps assigned partners engage in technical pre-sales, deployment, and consumption for the practices or solutions they have built. + Orchestrates a wide, complex range of activities in accordance with partner technical development plan, to develop solution offerings and value realization across a variety of solution areas. + Sets timelines and milestones, and tracks progress toward objectives. Leverages industry expertise and establishes technical credibility with partners to drive Microsoft Technology adoption. + Demonstrates partner and customer obsession in driving digital transformation and Microsoft technology adoption by helping them realize the value, meet their business objectives, achieve their consumption and business targets, and accelerate growth. + Leverages rich expertise and relationships with others to guide the development of partner technology roadmaps that enable them to expand into new markets and provide them with a competitive edge. **Partner and Industry Insights** + Synthesizes and combines various business insights from their team, global best practices, proof points from experience with several countries and regions. + Leads the orchestration of complex teams across the organization to gather information, collaborate on performance markers, and identify potential risks in partner accounts. + Brings in business and industry insights to address the broader business challenges for the partner. Executes work against the overall business and technical strategy. **Partner Enablement** + Helps partners build practices or solutions and shares their experience and influence with partners through solution-sales guidance. + Influences partner to enable the broader technical team to ensure that technical pre-sales, deployment, and consumption (with a focus on key strategic workloads and solutions) are part of solution development efforts. + Coaches the partner on building resilience to technical issues and dealing with competition. + Uses existing and new readiness resources and demonstrates expertise in creating enablement plans for large and high-stakes customers, and all-up Microsoft business. + Leverages partner enablement programs to increase partner workforce skilling and delivery capabilities to help partners realize customer value from Microsoft technology adoption, to help partner monetize with Microsoft. **Solution Development** + Proactively influences the development of groundbreaking and highly impactful solutions using Microsoft technologies, and builds solutions into the partner ecosystem to enable partners to sell to end-customers. **Strategy Formulation** + Provides analysis of overall partner needs for some of the largest and most complex accounts, and advises on gaps that would benefit from Microsoft solutions, using an understanding of the business strategies and outcomes that technology can support. + Leads the adoption of technologies, long-term vision of the customer's/partner's business strategy and driving action to bring to fruition. + Creates mid-term and long-term technical development plans (TDP) for highly prominent, challenging, and/or strategic accounts based on a deep understanding of business and technology priorities and industry landscape in alignment with the Partner Business Plans (PBPs) and in collaboration with the Partner Development Manager (PDM). + Drives envisioning and technical and program changes in the roadmaps around new and groundbreaking technologies. + Ensures execution of technology strategy and digital transformation by anticipating and/or leading the resolution of technical blockers that arise during strategy planning and implementation, and driving technology adoption. Ensures that the execution of work supports the transformation of the partners and their customer's technology capacity, capability, and co-selling across the engagement, and uses expertise and influence to accelerate strategy execution. **Trusted Advisor** + Acts as the "Chief Technology Officer (CTO)" in established, long-term relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs) and business decision makers (BDM) at the C-level (to the extent that the partner will call for consultation without being prompted), for their partner portfolio, and advises on solutions and positions Microsoft offerings. + Acts as a thought leader and internal advocate by providing insights, feedback, and challenges from the partner to internal teams (e.g., product groups, engineers) across all levels of the organization. Drives action to ensure that internal teams understand and respond to insights. **Qualifications** **Required/minimum qualifications** Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 6+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, product development, or related technical/sales experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 8+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, product development, or related technical/sales experience OR equivalent experience. **Additional or preferred qualifications** Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 8+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, product development, or related technical/sales experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 12+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, product development, or related technical/sales experience OR equivalent experience. 8+ years experience with relevant technologies (e.g., cloud, infrastructure, Microsoft platform). 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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .