Senior Product Manager, Storage Strategy and Planning at Microsoft

Do you want to be at the forefront of innovating the latest hardware designs to propel Microsoft’s cloud growth? Are you seeking a unique career opportunity that combines both technical capabilities, cross team collaboration, with business insight and strategy?  

Join our Senior Product Manager, Storage Strategy and Planning (SPARC) team within Microsoft’s Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure (AHSI) organization and be a part of the organization behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission.   

Microsoft delivers more than 200 online services to more than one billion individuals worldwide and AHSI is the team behind our expanding cloud infrastructure. We deliver the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsofts cloud businesses including Microsoft Azure, Bing, MSN, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Teams and Xbox Live.   

The SPARC organization manages Azure’s hardware roadmap from architecture concept through production for all of Microsoft’s current and future on-line services.  Well-defined and executed strategic planning ensures products meet the requirements for performance, features, and time-to-market. The ability to draw insights from a deep understanding of the cloud Hardware (HW) Infrastructure landscape and industry trends is critical in informing the roadmap and planning decisions. Deep technical understanding of our hardware architecture, workload modeling and analysis are necessary to making informed, data-driven decisions. Our hardware technology pathfinding work helps keep our product portfolio competitive by maturing new concepts for productization. Together these functions are able to create a strategic hardware and technology roadmap. 

As a Senior Product Manager, Storage Strategy and Planning, you will drive engagement with technology providers, understand their product portfolio and roadmap, work with internal partners and strategize how 1st and 3rd part technology solutions intercept Azure hardware infrastructure roadmap. The role will involve driving requirements with technology providers that enable the growth of the Azure cloud business and give it a competitive edge over other cloud service providers.  

Join our SPARC team and be a part of the world’s fastest growing cloud service! 

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree AND 5+ years experience in product/service/project/program management or software development
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of industry experience with a Cloud Service Provider, including across subsystems such as Central Processing Unit (CPU), Memory, or Storage technology development. 
• 5+ years of knowledge of cloud datacenter architecture, deployment and scale.

Other Requirments: 

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep technical understanding of storage media technologies (SSDs (Solid State Drives), HDDs (Hard Disk Drives), tape, etc.) and knowledgeable on storage industry trends.
• Deep technical understanding of server architecture, design, and development, with emphasis on power and performance analysis. 
• Proven customer obsession in prior roles where customer requirements were gathered and implemented into a product.
• Product Planning, Project Management, and Product Management experience.
• Proven capabilities to drive positive business results by working across multiple organizations.
• Experience working in HW Infrastructure Engineering Groups.
• Ability to build relationships and influence in a matrix organization.
• Highly effective written and oral communication skills with proven ability to present to a wide range of cross-functional partners across different teams and levels of the organization.
• Self-motivated, driven individual who can work in a rapidly changing environment.
• Ability to work in an ambiguous business environment with competing business tasks.
• Familiarity and previous experience developing programs through phase gate process.

Product Management IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $153,600 - $250,200 per year.

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 7, 2024.

Responsibilities

You’ll be expected to collaborate and drive efforts across multiple engineering groups (business units) within Microsoft and external technology providers and organizations; success will be achieved by collaborating with cross-functional teams to meet or exceeding business unit requirements with technical solutions, as well as developing and putting in place processes and methods that bring about efficient collaboration and decision making within Microsoft and Azure. You’ll need to have both excellent project management and people skills paired with technical depth. Responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with 1st and 3rd party technology providers, understand their portfolios, partner with internal stakeholders in engineering and business groups and drive a competitive and executable storage hardware roadmap strategy for Azure hardware infrastructure.
• Deep dive into storage technology and Infrastructure offerings and trends, quantitatively compare various offerings and develop recommendations and strategy that give a unique edge to Azure hardware infrastructure.
• Perform roadmap scenario modeling, financial modeling, and market analysis for the recommended storage HW platform factoring in performance, features, cost, and time-to-market tradeoffs.
• Drive internal alignment on storage hardware technology platform plan of record.
• Recommend internal and external process improvements and excellence conversations cross functionally to ensure we have optimized processes and aligned across partner teams.
• Create, maintain, and effectively disseminate project communication to stakeholders.