Azure ACE Engineer II

Every minute of every day, customers stake their entire business and reputation on Microsoft Cloud. The Azure Customer Experience (CXP) team believes that when we meet our high standards for quality and reliability, our customers win. If we falter, our customers fail their end-customers. Our vision is to turn Microsoft Cloud customers into fans.

We are the ACES Strategic team (Advanced Cloud Engineering & Supportability), a global engineering team in Azure CXP and we are focused on Strategic Azure Customers. We are customer-obsessed problem-solvers. We orchestrate and drive deep engagements in areas like Incident Management, Problem Management, Support, Resiliency, and empowering the customers. We represent the customer and amplify customer voice with Azure Engineering connecting to the quality vision for Azure. We innovate and find ways to scale our learning across our customer base. Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are, how we work, and what we enable our customers to achieve. We know that empowering our customers starts with empowering our team to show up authentically, work in ways that are best for them, and achieve their career goals.

Are you constantly customer-obsessed and passionate about solving complex technical problems? Do you take pride in enhancing customer experience through innovation? If the answer is Yes, then join us and surround yourself with people who are passionate about cloud computing and believe that extraordinary support is critical to customer success.

 As a customer focused Advanced Cloud Engineer, you are the primary engineering contact accountable for your customer’s support experience on Azure. You will drive resolution of critical and complex problems, support key customer projects on Azure, and be the voice of the customer within Azure. In this role, you will work in partnership with Customer Success Account Managers, Cloud Solution Architects, Technical Support Engineers, and Azure engineering with our mission to turn Azure customers into fans with world-class engineering-led support experience.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years of experience in Software industry experience related to technology OR equivalent experience.
• 6 years of demonstrated IT experience supporting and troubleshooting enterprise level, mission-critical applications resolving complex issues/situations and driving technical resolution across cross-functional organizations.
• 7+ years’ experience in an external customer / client facing role.
  2+ years of experience working on cloud computing technologies.The 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.
• Experience with being on-call.
• Technical Skills: Cloud computing technologies. Demonstrated hands on experience in one or more of the following:
• Core IaaS: Compute, Storage, Networking, High Availability
• Data Platform and Bigdata: SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, HDInsight/Hadoop, Machine Learning, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory / Data Bricks
• Azure PaaS Services: Redis Cache, Service Bus, Event Hub, Cloud Service, IoT suite, Mobile Apps, etc.
• Experience in Monitoring related technologies like Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Resource Graph, Azure Alerts, Network Watcher, Grafana, Ambari, Prometheus, Datadog, Confluent, etc.
• Experience in deploying, configuring, and operating enterprise Monitoring solutions.
• Experience in one or more automation languages (PowerShell, Python, C#, Open Source)
• Communication skills: ability to empathize with customers and convey confidence. Able to explain highly technical issues to varied audiences. Able to prioritize and advocate customer’s needs to the proper channels. Take ownership and work towards a resolution.
• Customer Obsession: Passion for customers and focus on delivering the right customer experience.
• Growth Mindset: Openness and ability to learn new skills and technologies in a fast-paced environment.

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.

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.

Technically Oriented

• Track customer incidents, engage with strategic customers and partners to understand issues, contribute to troubleshooting through diagnostics, communicate progress and next steps to customers with a focus on reducing time taken to mitigate critical incidents.
• Use engineering and support tools, customer telemetry and/or direct customer input to detect and flag trends/patterns of issues in the products or products misuse across customers. Develop and share insights and best practices with customers.
• Recommend and help develop training/readiness modules (e.g., mentoring, leading triages, content creation, brown bag sessions, blogs, quality assurance checks). Acts as a mentor, shares knowledge, and contributes to the content and readiness strategy for the team.

Customer Solution Lifecycle Management

• Serve as a connecting point between the product team and customers throughout the engagement lifecycle, engage with customers to understand their business and availability needs, develop and offer proactive guidance on designing configurations and deploying solutions on Azure.
• Handle complex escalations on customer issues from the customer or support or field teams, conduct impact analysis, help customers with answers to their technical questions, and serve as an escalation resource in areas of subject matter expertise.
• Conduct in-depth root cause analysis of issues and translates findings into opportunities for improvement and track and drive them as repair items.

Relationship/Experience Management

• Act as voice of customers and synthesize product feedback from strategic customers to provide input on business plans developed by the product groups. Identify customer usage patterns and drive resolutions on reoccurring issues with product groups. Close the feedback loop with the customers on product features.
• Partner with other teams (e.g., program managers, software engineers, product, customer service support teams), prioritize, unblock, and resolve critical customer issues.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to deliver solutions to strategic customers and develop mechanisms that improve customer health and reduce the turnover time.

Embody our culture and values.