Principal Azure Application Solution Architect

Introduction
As a Strategy Consultant at IBM you will help reinvent businesses and industries by developing and utilizing specialized knowledge of industry-specific and cross-industry competitive strategies. You’ll manage complex components of an engagement working closely with clients and their customers to understand their pain points. Your strategic recommendations will drive change in a digitally-enabled era and give you the opportunity to collaborate with highly talented IBMers. Are you ready?

Your Role and Responsibilities
The role is a combination of both technical pre-sales and delivery with an approximate 50/50 split which will vary based on demand.
Depending on your role and demand your pre-sales activities will be mixed across opportunity origination (campaigns and offering enablement) and opportunity closing (solutioning).
On a day-to-day basis you will collaborate with our sellers accounts and delivery teams purely focused on transformation solutions with Microsoft cloud and eco-system technologies.
Act as a Microsoft cloud evangelist and using your deep expertise to articulate technical answers demonstrate Microsoft solutions cloud practices and the business value to our clients.
Keep up to date with new technology and be an enablement leader to assist our clients to assess build and deliver new capabilities.
Responsible for creating cloud value transformation business cases for our clients articulating the benefits of the Microsoft cloud platforms.
Build strong and enduring relationships with our clients account teams and technology practices.
Establish relationships and collaborate with Microsoft UKI and our wider IBM businesses Nordcloud IBM Security and IBM Technology.
Lead the end-to-end solution shaping technology architecture cost estimation delivery planning deal economics proposal and statements of work authoring.
Lead the internal solution sign-off within the IBM solution release process ensuring that our solution teams have created the optimal winning solution that can be confidently executed by our delivery teams.
Lead the presentation of solutions to our client C-suite and senior buyers – articulating technical requirements mapping business value and client obligations.
Collaborate with our global Microsoft campaigns and offerings teams to develop distil and enable with your region.
Lead or oversee large-scale and complex deal cycles with our largest enterprise accounts.
Take an active role in monitoring and driving our Microsoft opportunity pipeline
Own a sales pipeline of opportunities across your solution area co-ordinating with architects sellers account teams and partners.
Lead a team (dedicated or virtual) of solution architects in your solution area. You will be responsible for prioritising your teams’ activities in opportunity origination solutioning offering development training and billable work.
Offering leader for your solution area and responsible for the sales performance. You will live and breathe your offerings and with your team ensure that our sellers account teams clients and partners are all aware of our key go-to-market offerings and campaigns.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• You have a passion for technology expertise creativity and evangelism.
• Consulting experience is essential and you will be able to demonstrate your ability to influence manage stakeholders and act with integrity.
• You have experience with Microsoft technologies and the eco-system of ISV products and offerings.
• Ideally you come from a technology delivery background where you have experience in support engineering and/or project delivery and can be hands on where required.
• Experience with working with large global technology systems integrators and know how to navigate your way around their offerings capabilities accounts and partners to originate and delivery opportunities.
• You can talk at the level of a technical engineer right through to the c-suite. You have a good presence and can establish immediate credibility.
• Worked on large scale complex solutions and delivery with Global Fortune 500 businesses or similar.
• Leading coaching and mentoring team and project members.
• Developing go-to-market offerings campaigning and enabling sales teams to take to market.
• Demonstrate commercial awareness
• You have experience of being a technology leader and trusted ambassador.
• You will have several years of business leadership in a technology role where you have been responsible for the overall performance of a relevant technology domain including signings targets billability utilisation demand planning skills planning talent acquisition and operational standards.
• Consulting and technology offering leadership experience
• You will preferably have a network within Microsoft or similar eco-system and be very familiar with how Microsoft operates and goes to market.
• Able to demonstrate experience of leadership across people clients and commercial in equal measure.
• Extensive experience on the Microsoft platform and its services.
  • Azure Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Security Compliance and Identity Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• .Net and/or Java enterprise application modernisation (PaaS Containers Serverless Low Code)
• Managed database modernisation (Azure SQL Azure Database Cosmos DB)
• Microservice architectures and containerisation techniques
• Cloud native build (AKS Azure Red Hat OpenShift)
• Cloud native integration (Azure API Management Azure Functions Azure Logic Apps)
• Low/No-code with Power Apps
• DevOps adoption advisory (Visual Studio Azure DevOps GitHub DevSecOps)
• CI/CD (GitHub Ansible Jenkins Azure DevOps)
• Application monitoring (Application Insights App Dynamics Dynatrace Grafana/Prometheus etc.)
• Scrum Master or Developer certification
• Experience with Agile