Cloud Solutions Architect- Permanent
About the job
As Cloud Solution Architect you are driving Azure-based initiatives in collaboration with customers and participating in both pre- and post-sales efforts, combining commercial and technical cloud experience.
The CSA is a customer facing technology role that is accountable for a great customer cloud journey experience. You provide strategic advice, professional services and robust solutions to national and international enterprises, helping them to successfully transition to and operate in the Microsoft cloud using our Managed Services.
Responsibilities
* Understand customers' needs, their background, organizational dynamics, and the pressures it may be under.
* Provide expert technical advice and design, answering RFPs and RFIs and architecting solutions. Translate customer needs into corresponding architecting solutions.
* Coordinates, and has direct responsibility for, a project, product or specific set of tasks related to a department or business unit.
* Managing deadlines and progress across the team to ensure the project is delivered on time and within budget
* Thinking strategically about business, product, and technical challenges.
* Validate and as needed sharpening sales defined customer needs
* Understand specific Azure technology components and solutions for actual delivery and operations.
* Lead technical architecture reviews in coordination with the CTO council and various technical teams to determine compliancy with the agreed standards and architecture.
* Providing the primary technical sounding board for customers and prospects, translating requirements into defined and supportable solutions.
* Where customers require non-standard capabilities, the Cloud Solution Architect optimizes available options with the customer, and provides quality assurance to make sure customer satisfaction is achieved during service delivery.
* Coordinate, connect and cooperate with CSAs, cloud engineers and technical subject matter experts within the organization
* Supporting Sales opportunities together with sales teams
* Keep up to date with market trends and competitive insights
Tasks
* Own & lead the technical customer engagement, commercial bids (SA's), assessments, architectural design sessions, implementation projects, proofs of concepts, act as the lead architect.
* Lead technical presentations, demonstrations, workshops, architecture design sessions, proof of concepts and pilots to explain, demonstrate, and prove to our customers the capabilities of our products and services, and how we can make their businesses more successful. This is such a way, that all stakeholders (technical and non-technical) get a good understanding of the solution.
* Helping identify and diagnose technical, architectural, and competitive blockers and respective solutions for sales opportunities and usage decision blockers and helping ensure that these solutions are implemented.
* Lead customers, in regard to their technical decisions, aligning with our sales opportunities and usage scenarios. This by tailoring your message, bringing ideas to customers, engaging with them to show our technology differentiation, and guiding them in decision making and act as the lead architect during implementation projects
* Participates in opportunity management through establishing a healthy pipeline to drive & win solutions.
* Shaping current and future products, marketing strategies, and customer centricity ideas through your feedback to sales, marketing, and engineering.
* Provide real-life constructive input to the product development process, ensuring that new capabilities are fit for the market, whilst at the same time acting as an evangelist to ensure that the agreed standards are adopted in new solutions as they are designed.
* Working knowledge with AGILE development, SCRUM and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
* Command of one or more of the following programming languages is an advantage: PowerShell, Bash, .NET, C , Java, JSON, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Responsive Web Design
About you
Education & experience
* Minimum of 5 years work experience with a similar role.
* Proven track record of building technical and business relationships with senior customer executives and providing consultancy in large or highly strategic accounts.
* Minimum of 3 years of relevant experience in architecting, designing and implementing Microsoft Azure private, public and hybrid cloud-based solutions.
* Experience in requirements gathering & business analyst skills.
* At least 5 years of experience in migrating on premise workloads to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
* Broad understanding of cloud computing technologies, business drivers, and emerging computing trends.
* In-depth knowledge of Microsoft Azure solutions.
* Good knowledge of Microsoft Azure and general data center infrastructure
* Knowledge or good understanding of Cloud Services & Concepts (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)
* Effective learning skills, ability to work well in a team environment and strong problem-solving skills are also critical to success in the role.
* Fluent in English, speaking Dutch and/or German is a big plus!
* Excellent interpersonal, written and oral communication skills.
* If you don't have experience with Azure, then we expect you to get certified on 200 level within 6 months after you join us.
Competences
* The ideal candidate is eager to learn, a great listener and communicator, has a strong passion for technology and is ready to flourish in a fast paced, high growth market
* Achievement motivation; driven to succeed and achieve goals
* Accountability, feeling end-responsible for own success
* Hunter mentality
* Emotional Adaptability; overcoming obstacles to success
* Excellent communication skills both internally and on C-level
* Emotional intelligence, listen, create rapport and "understand" people
* Ability to pitch value
* Great networker (in- and externally)
* Tech passionate self-starter with a professional process driven sales approach
Your personality
* Energetic, result driven and target oriented personality
* Excellent communicator and natural networker
* Team player but comfortable operating solo
* Motivated, proactive, accurate, organized and reliable
* Takes ownership and clear "get-it-done" mentality
If you are interested, contact Emily directly at e.livings@nigelfrank.com
