Microsoft Technology Specialist - Azure Data & AI

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.

With continued growth in digital data and the desire to leverage data to address problems that touch all aspects of our lives, Microsoft’s is growing to meet these challenges! The Azure Data & AI team is hiring experienced Azure Technical Specialist to join agile and diverse team in Data Platform (Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Gen2, Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric) and AI technologies (Azure OpenAI Services, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning)

The main goal of Microsoft Technology Specialist - Azure Data & AI is to win the technical decision of customers to purchase and use Microsoft technology and cloud services, for both Relational and Non-Relational scenarios. This includes Azure SQL, Open-source databases, Azure Analytics platform including Azure Cosmos DB and Microsoft Fabric and the entire Azure AI Platform - Azure Machine Learning plus Azure OpenAI . The Technical Specialist is expected to help the customers' technical evaluators and decision makers to take the best decisions, as well as find new opportunities through their contacts and engagements for sales specialists to pursue. As a Technical Specialist, you work within a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to help educate your customers at a technical level, demonstrate, and prove our solutions, and win the technical decision, allowing the team to achieve/exceed quarterly sales targets in your accounts. Being part of this team will allow you to maintain and develop your deep technical expertise across Microsoft and non-Microsoft cloud-based technologies. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your solution sales and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50%  from home.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

· 8+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

o OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

o OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

o 6+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.

8+ yr (s) experience in 3 or more of the following Data Platform Cloud solutions:

• Big Data and Data Warehouses including Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure SQL DW), Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift
• Advanced Analytics including Azure Data Bricks, data visualization tools (i.e. PowerBI, Tableau)
• SQL including OSS (postgres, MySQL etc), Azure SQL
• NoSQL Databases including OSS (Maria, Mongo etc), Cosmos DB
• Machine Learning including Azure ML, ML Server Artificial Intelligence including BOT framework, Cognitive Services, Cognitive Search

• Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).

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. 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.

Scale Customer Engagements

· Proactively identifies and engages with key customer technical decision makers and influencers while engaging sales team and helping lead sales strategy.

· Uses knowledge of customer context, and deep technical, domain, and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.

· Leads and ensures complex technical wins (e.g., cross-workload, cross-team, cross-geo, subsidiary-level impact) by establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies), coaching others (e.g., technical sellers, account teams), leveraging knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds [ECIFs]). Ensures alignment of Microsoft technologies with future sector standards and requirements by working with industry boards and driving customer case studies and references.

· Leverages knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU) and proactively engages product teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate escalated technical blockers by conveying impact and anticipating and addressing future potential blockers based on needs.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

· Scales wins through partner in a sell-with environment by promoting the partner within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams) and developing deep partner relationships.

· Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build subsidiary strategy.

Build Strategy

· Builds competitive knowledge, documents compete patterns, and shares within the community to drive change and escalations for competitive selling strategies. Acts as a subject matter expert on a particular competition. Delivers competitive knowledge back to product and engineering teams.

· Proactively develops strategic cross-workload/subsidiary and account level responses to specific market threats by identifying market patterns and delivering feedback to business group on trends and needs.

· Works with local account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailors to audience for the local markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the competitive landscape, and broader market trends. Where applicable, builds consumption plans with moderately complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.

Solution Design and Proof

· Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions, pilots, hackathons) of solutions based on multiple products and position solutions against competitors. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and programmatic framework for re-use by the business.

· Adapts and extends architecture patterns to accommodate complex customer requirements and drive integration solutions for industry flavor. Delivers assets that can be leveraged by others in the business.

· Applies advanced sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) to guide customers through digital transformation solutions and uses innovation to challenge solutions against changing technology (e.g., Power Apps).

Education

· Builds readiness plans for peers and proactively identifies gaps and new opportunities for learning. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.

· Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing best practices (e.g., architectures, materials) and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events (e.g., TechReady). Provides insight into how to identify opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding.

· Monitors, responds to, and acts as a thought leader on internal tech community posts, establishes and leads vibrant tech communities including community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor to the community.

Other · Embody our culture and values