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

o 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

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

o OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

o 4+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.

4+ 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

· Engages with and reaches out to customers proactively and independently.

· Uses knowledge of customer context, solution or portfolio expertise, and technical and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.

· Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended 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]). Searches for customer references to use in engagements.

· Leverages foundational 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 blockers by conveying impact.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

· Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by acting as liaison between the partner and team and facilitating partner resources and processes throughout the course of the project.

· Supports partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams (e.g., Global Partner Solutions).

Build Strategy

· Captures core competitive knowledge and delivers back to product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop compete strategies for assigned customers.

· Provides strategic, technical, and partner input based on Microsoft capability at the account level to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner, competitor, or open-source knowledge.

· Works with account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor Microsoft messaging to audience using knowledge of customer feedback, specific Microsoft solutions, and their context in a competitive landscape. Where applicable, builds consumption plans 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) of products, services, and integration through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment.

· Presents and applies architecture patterns to partners or customers and drives cross-workload support for Microsoft Solutions.

· Applies sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team in addressing customer digital transformation and leveraging insights to align new or changing technology to customer business needs.

Education

· Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.

· Demonstrates new and updated products to increase internal virtual teams' understanding of solutions and new opportunities.

· Monitors and responds to internal tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area.

Other · Embody our culture and values