Job Description

The Capacity Supply Chain and Provisioning (CSCP) group is an exciting and fast evolving group within Microsoft whose vision is to empower customers to achieve more by delivering cloud capacity differentiated at scale. The organization is responsible for planning, delivery and provision of all data centers globally powering Microsoft cloud properties. CSCP supports over 200 online businesses including Bing, O365, OneDrive, Xbox and Windows Azure branded services.

Cloud Sourcing and Supply Chain (CSSC) organization within CSCP manages sourcing and supply of IT hardware for the data centers. Well-defined and executed sourcing and supply chain management ensures reliable on-time performance, optimized cost, prevents urgent and unplanned investments, and provides accurate and timely information across the supply base and internally across the infrastructure organization. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide.

The purpose of the Technical strategic sourcing engineer role is to partner with our development engineering organization and identify opportunities for value optimization. In doing so, this candidate will need to think beyond the hardware architecture and consider the entire end to end ecosystem. Idea is to focus on TCO (Total Cost Optimization) which means considering everything from the upstream supply chain to detail design choices, logistics, packaging, all the way to our data center infrastructure. This role will consider all these variables and pull together a TCO business case to demonstrate the value proposition. Another key part of the engagement is the relationship and alignment with our key supplier partners. This candidate will need to build up and establish strong relationships with our strategic partner suppliers and consider how they tie into the total solution. Some of the value optimization ideas may come from our partner suppliers and the candidate will need to analyze, assess and consider the TCO business case of these proposals then review them with engineering while program managing and facilitating the implementation of the concept until its baked into the final design.

This role will also leverage knowledge of component costs as well as cost modeling tools to come up with the predictive costs in the Value optimization business case. Another key aspect to the role will be the alignment with our sourcing partners on the predictive costs, concepts and strategies being communicated with our engineering partners.

Additionally, this role will tie into competitive analytics where the candidate will leverage competitive teardowns as well as publicly available competitive information to better understand the industry direction and identify opportunities for value optimization on our products.

Key responsibilities:

* Understand technology trends in the cloud industry
* Partner with MSFT internal teams and supply base to understand general technology and various architecture directions e.g. Liquid cooling solutions, power architecture for data center, FPGA architecture
* Leverage these learnings to identify design vs cost optimization opportunities
* Identify and drive design-cost optimization which yield best Total-Cost-of-Ownership from MSFT from product conceptual phase
* Study and understand current architecture and constraints for Microsoft solutions by working closely with our engineering teams at early design phase.
* Work closely with suppliers on opportunities and vet with internal engineering teams
* Quantify opportunities to optimize Total-Cost-of-Ownership for specific product / architecture
* Work across the various stakeholders to build up value proposition for each ideation from a Total-Cost-of-Ownership perspective
* Build business case and drive solutions into production once approved
* Success will be measured as follows:
* Total opportunities identified as savings opportunities
* Total opportunities/Value implemented with Engineering and Supply Chain teams

A successful candidate will demonstrate the following Traits/Behaviors:

* Growth mindset with a focus on diversity and inclusion in all engagements
* Great influencer skills through fact based data
* Strong analytical skills and experienced with key analytical tools
* Keen ability to synthesize an opportunity into a compelling story
* Excellent ability to influence both internal team members as well as external partners
* Ability to successfully navigate through ambiguities/obstacles through facts, evaluation of alternatives, open-mindedness, thought-through strategy, and superior communication.
* Lead cross-functional engagements.
* Ability to both quantify and qualify cost opportunities with relentless drive to over achieve and deliver excellence in a professional environment.
* Passion for value optimization

Basic Qualifications:

* 10 + years of engineering experience with a preference in EE working in Cloud Enterprise industry.
* Bachelor's degree in an engineering field required (preference in EE)

Preferred Requirements

* Strong working knowledge of Cloud motherboard architecture a requirement
* Quick learner of Microsoft systems and processes.
* Agile & Adaptable.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.