Security Specialist Technical Skilling Strategy Lead
Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) - Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.
The Customer & Commercial Success (CCS) organization, an organization within MCAPS-Core, is the connected engine that turns Microsoft’s commercial strategy into execution at scale — making it simpler and faster for the field to win for every customer, in every segment, region, and role. The organization brings together planning, landing, execution excellence, services portfolio and delivery, and field activation across Account Team Unit (ATU), Solution Team Unit (STU), and Customer Success Unit (CSU) to accelerate customer value, drive growth, and strengthen the end-to-end experience across every customer moment.
Security has never been more critical to organizations worldwide. As customers accelerate AI adoption while navigating an increasingly complex threat landscape, Microsoft Security is uniquely positioned to help organizations secure their future and realize value from Microsoft’s security platform.
The Microsoft Security Enablement & Partner Strategy organization is seeking a highly strategic, customer-obsessed, and technically credible leader to serve as the Security Specialist Technical Skilling Lead. In this role, you will define and continuously evolve the technical skilling strategy for Microsoft’s global Security Solutions Specialist community, ensuring our sales organization has the technical depth, solution fluency, and customer engagement capability required to accelerate customer transformation and business growth.
You will work at the intersection of sales strategy, cybersecurity, AI, technical capability development, business performance, and field transformation. Leveraging customer insights, sales signals, field intelligence, market trends, and performance data, you will identify the technical knowledge, solution expertise, competitive fluency, and customer conversation capabilities required for Security Solutions Specialists to succeed.
The ideal candidate combines strategic thinking, technical curiosity, executive influence, sales acumen, and passion for developing high-performing field organizations. You are energized by emerging technologies, motivated by customer impact, and excited by the opportunity to shape how Microsoft develops world-class Security sellers at global scale.
This role offers a unique opportunity to influence how Microsoft builds technical confidence, scales Security expertise, and accelerates AI and security transformation for customers around the world.
Candidates who live within 50 miles of Microsoft's Redmond campus will be required to work in the office 3 days per week.
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.
Responsibilities
• Leads enterprise risk strategy, analytics, and insight generation by establishing best practices for risk modeling, datasets, scoring methodologies, and AI-enabled analytics; transforming risk data into actionable insights that inform prioritization, resource allocation, mitigation strategies, and leadership decision-making across a portfolio of projects and risks.
• Provides organizational leadership in risk assessment and governance by overseeing risk management processes, ensuring teams gather and analyze appropriate internal and external information, guiding risk identification and evaluation efforts, managing senior stakeholder relationships, and driving accountability for risk ownership and mitigation activities across multiple business areas.
• Drives risk remediation, controls, and compliance oversight by championing treatment plans, risk registers, governance frameworks, and risk exception processes; ensuring mitigation strategies are implemented effectively; coordinating with leadership across accountable teams; and monitoring risk trends to ensure appropriate attention and escalation.
• Builds and develops high-performing risk management teams by modeling Microsoft leadership principles, coaching employees, establishing standards and best practices, fostering adoption of AI-enabled capabilities, and creating an environment of accountability, growth, and continuous improvement in risk management practices.
Define and Evolve Technical Skilling Strategy
• Define and continuously refine Microsoft’s technical skilling framework for Security Solutions Specialist Sellers, identifying the solution knowledge, technical fluency, competitive awareness, customer conversation skills, and advisory capabilities required to drive customer and business outcomes.
• Develop deep expertise across Microsoft’s Security portfolio, emerging AI technologies, customer security priorities, and industry trends to inform future capability priorities.
• Establish technical skilling models that help Security leaders understand the capabilities required to identify, qualify, prioritize, and accelerate sales opportunities.
• Identify the sales behaviors, customer engagement patterns, and technical conversation capabilities that distinguish Microsoft’s highest-performing Security Solutions Specialists globally.
Generate Strategic Insights Through Data and Field Intelligence
• Leverage sales performance data, customer feedback, field intelligence, market signals, and emerging technology trends to identify technical capability gaps, strengths, and future skilling opportunities.
• Analyze sales opportunity patterns, customer engagement signals, pipeline health, deal progression, customer priorities, and business outcomes to understand the technical capabilities associated with seller effectiveness.
• Create evidence-based recommendations that influence technical skilling investments, readiness priorities, sales capability strategies, and future role evolution.
• Monitor market, customer, industry, and competitive developments to ensure Microsoft’s Security seller skilling strategy remains aligned to customer demand and business priorities.
Drive Global Technical Skilling Strategy
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive strategy for building technical fluency across Microsoft’s Security Solutions Specialist community.
• Partner with engineering, product, sales, customer success, technical strategy, and enablement stakeholders to align technical skilling investments with customer needs, product innovation, and business priorities.
• Translate Microsoft Security strategy, product roadmap evolution, competitive dynamics, and market opportunities into scalable skilling priorities and capability development plans.
• Help shape the future of Security selling by identifying the knowledge and skills required to support AI-driven security transformation, customer modernization, and long-term trusted relationships.
Serve as a Trusted Sales and Technical Advisor
• Act as a recognized thought leader on Security Solutions Specialist technical skilling, seller effectiveness, and field capability development.
• Present strategic recommendations and technical skilling priorities to senior leaders using customer insights, sales signals, business analysis, and field intelligence.
• Build partnerships across Security, Engineering, Product, Sales, Customer Success, Technical Strategy, and Enablement organizations to drive alignment and shared outcomes.
• Serve as a trusted advisor on how Microsoft should evolve Security seller technical capability to remain competitive in a rapidly changing security and AI landscape.
Accelerate AI-Powered Sales Excellence
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI to accelerate seller learning, knowledge acquisition, technical confidence, customer conversation preparation, and field effectiveness.
• Evaluate how emerging AI technologies are transforming customer expectations, security buying priorities, and seller engagement motions, translating those insights into skilling priorities.
• Explore innovative approaches for personalizing technical capability development and increasing the speed at which Security sellers can build solution fluency.
• Help establish best practices for leveraging AI to improve technical readiness, customer engagement, opportunity acceleration, and Security Solutions Specialist effectiveness worldwide.
Measure Impact and Drive Continuous Improvement
• Define success metrics and performance indicators that connect technical skilling investments to customer outcomes, seller effectiveness, pipeline quality, opportunity progression, and business impact.
• Continuously assess the effectiveness of skilling strategies and adjust priorities based on measurable results, field feedback, and evolving business needs.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, innovation, learning, and continuous improvement across the Security Enablement & Partner Strategy organization.
• Establish feedback mechanisms and intelligence systems that enable ongoing optimization of Microsoft’s Security sales skilling investments.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Marketing, Finance, Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in business consulting, sales, sales operations, information technology (IT), account management, business development, marketing, IT field sales, or a related field
- OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years experience in in Near Term Strategy (1-2 years out), Management Consulting, or Finance.
Preferred Qualifications
- 4+ years of experience working with enterprise security technologies, cloud platforms, sales organizations, technical sales teams, customer-facing field roles, or enterprise software businesses.
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex cybersecurity concepts into practical, customer-focused messaging that enables sales teams to effectively engage business and technical decision-makers.
- Experience enabling technical sales professionals, solution specialists, or go-to-market teams to articulate business value, customer outcomes, and security solutions to executive and technical decision-makers.
- Deep understanding of modern cybersecurity technologies, including identity, endpoint protection, threat protection, data security, compliance, or cloud security solutions.
- Proven ability to identify capability gaps and create scalable learning frameworks, content, or programs that accelerate technical proficiency across large organizations.
- Experience using data, insights, and performance metrics to assess skilling effectiveness and continuously optimize learning strategies and programs.
- Experience engaging with senior stakeholders and aligning skilling investments to business priorities.
Sales Strategy Enablement IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 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 $137,600 - $222,600 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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.