Strategic Hardware Planner for Video and Data Acceleration

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 Strategic Planning and Architecture (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 Microsoft's 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 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 the Strategic Hardware Planner for Video and Data Acceleration you will 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! 

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 project management and people skills paired with technical depth and passion. Some of your responsibilities will be to: 

• 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 hardware roadmap strategy for Azure hardware infrastructure.  

• Deep dive into CPU, Accelerator, Memory, 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 Hardware (HW) pla