Career Path of a Finance Manager at Microsoft

I started at Wake Forest University, majoring in finance and minoring in computer science. At Wake, I had the opportunity to join several clubs. One, which I joined my freshman year, was the pre-Wall Street career track.

This program was designed to help students from Wake Forest get opportunities on Wall Street, so it was heavily banking focused. My time at Wake, especially on the finance side, was very model-heavy and involved keeping up with current events. I was also in the Dow Jones Club, which focused on stock market performance.

My classes also catered to this focus, building an skillset geared towards investment banking or wealth management. I also had the computer science background from my minor. While I wasn't a great coder, I learned enough to understand the concepts, which is valuable, especially now with tools like ChatGPT.

When I first started looking at jobs, I went back to my sophomore year summer. I had the opportunity to intern at a small window company through a neighborhood connection in my hometown of Hershey, Pennsylvania. This company had less than $200 million in sales and not many employees.

It was helpful to get some experience, as it's difficult for sophomores and even freshmen to secure internships. I worked as a financial analyst intern, primarily on the sales side, and did some work on the commission structure. It was interesting to see how finance operates in a corporate setting.

In my junior year, I applied to many banks and interviewed with them. I also applied to some tech companies due to my computer science background, although I didn't fully understand what it entailed at the time. I networked with people at Microsoft and ended up landing an internship there.

As an intern at Microsoft, I supported the Azure team, focusing on pricing for various Azure services. I did a lot of VM bandwidth pricing for external customers, which involved understanding unit costs to enable sellers to offer discounts to large enterprise clients.

I enjoyed my time at Microsoft and returned full-time after graduating from Wake. I joined a financial rotational program, where I experienced different finance roles every six months. This could include corporate development, treasury, or operations.

At a large company like Microsoft, there are many finance opportunities, from market analysis to treasury. The program allowed me to explore these roles and see what interested me. I spent time in treasury, did some M&A work, and was in operations where I saw the planning and launch of new products.

After the two-year program, which I completed in about a year and a half, I finished in product finance. This was around the time AI was first released, and Microsoft Copilot was launching, so they needed support for these new products.

I then joined our cybersecurity product team, supporting the investment and gross margin strategy for these products. While many people might not have heard of them, these are cybersecurity products mainly purchased by enterprises. We now have AI products that integrate many of these cybersecurity offerings for large enterprises.

These products support functions like network monitoring, account creation, and permission management, performed by what are called network analysts or cyber professionals. These are backend tasks that are not typically visible. Our cybersecurity products are primarily for very large enterprises, although small businesses use them too. I have been supporting these products on the product side for almost two years now.