Senior Digital Technology Specialist- Azure Data & AI

Do you love working with Startups and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to achieve their business outcomes? This team is at the leading edge of our AI business and one of the fastest growing groups in the company.  We operate like a startup with an entrepreneurial, high-performance mindset, but remain grounded in our shared cultural priorities: Diversity and Inclusivity, Wellbeing, Sustainability, and Learning. This is a unique opportunity for a strategic thinker to execute deals that drive significant publicity, competitive share, and revenue for the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform. Senior leaders across Microsoft are making an incredible commitment to this initiative and we are rapidly scaling this program, looking for new talent to join our expanding team.  If you have been described as customer obsessed, we invite you apply today! 

Microsoft is revolutionizing customer experiences by leveraging AI to address challenges and enhance achievements. You will play a pivotal part, guiding customers through AI's potential to solve problems, boost efficiency, and drive innovation. By staying abreast of AI advancements and fostering collaborative relationships, sellers ensure customers fully harness AI's transformative power for actionable insights and industry success. 

As a Microsoft Senior Digital Technology Specialist (D-TS) for Azure Data & AI solutions, you will be tasked with winning the technical decision of customers to purchase and use our technology. The Senior D-TS is expected to be able to both own and win customers’ technical decisions and ensure their success with our platforms, as well as find new opportunities through their contacts and engagements for sales specialists to pursue. As a Senior D-TS, you work within a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to help educate startups and ISVs 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 role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home. The other 50% of the time must be spent at Microsoft Digital Sales Center. 

In Small, Medium and Corporate (SMC) and Digital Sales, we have set out to empower our customers through the unique value of the Microsoft cloud by building a globally led, digital-first-scale organization aligned with partners. Dedicated to one of the fastest growing customer segments, the organization is on pace to be Microsoft's next $100 billion-dollar business - this is where you come in. As part of local subsidiaries or Digital Sales centers around the world, you will support a dedicated set of customers in identifying and achieving their business objectives through best-in-class digital engagement and partner co-selling.  

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/Minimum Qualifications

• Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years’ experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises database infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management. 
• 2+ years experience creating AI, Database, or Analytics Proof of Concepts (PoC)/Pilots for customers ​that lead to production deployments. 
• Professional level fluency to read, write, and speak English, Spanish and or Brazilian Portuguese.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Digital Natives, Startups, and ISVs  
• Cross organizational and functional collaboration skills to drive the optimal solution for the customer needs
• Demonstratable experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises database infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management. 
• Certification in relevant (Microsoft or industry) technologies or disciplines (e.g., Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Azure Data & AI, Information Security, Architecture). 
  • Azure Certifications examples include: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104), Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (AZ-305), Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP 203) or or Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102) or Enterprise Data Analyst Associate (DP 600) or Azure Cosmos DB Developer Specialty (DP 420) or Fabric Analytics Engineering Associate (DP- 600). 
• Knowledge of Database platforms such as AWS, GCP, Mongo DB, and Oracle. 
• Knowledge of Intelligent Data and Analytics platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS (Redshift), GCP Big query, Teradata, Netezza, Exadata, Apache Spark, Tableau, Qlik, Looker, etc. including financial performance, key messaging, and roadmap.
• Knowledge of AI platforms (AWS, Google, IBM, and Oracle) with Certifications such as Google Cloud Professional ML Engineer, AWS Certified Machine Learning, or IBM certified Data Science professional. 
• Understands Database Platforms such as Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, IBM Db2, Snowflake, Cassandra DB, Maria DB, etc. 
• Understands Analytics Platforms such as Fabric, Azure Databricks, Snowflake, real-time analytics, Power BI) OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.  3+ years of hands-on programming experience (Scala, Python, SQL etc.) 

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

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

• Proactively own technical discussions with Startups & ISVs leveraging processes and tools, demos, and programs using consultative sales methodology and technical expertise to influence the Startup/ISV vision; establish rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams. 
• Proactively build technical strategy: map the agreed Startup/ISV vision into a strategy, resolve concerns, preventing and removing technical blockers and validating a strong business case for investment and translated technology complexity into business impact. Work with Startup & ISVs, account team, and partners to orchestrate a roadmap for implementation guiding the customer to choose the best Microsoft Intelligent Data and Analytics platform and win the AI Design, inclusive of Microsoft AI, Application services, and Databases. 
• Design the solution using your technical knowledge, architectural approach, consultancy skills and our methodology to win a Startup/ISV technical decision and meet their needs; drive POCs/Pilots to create momentum for MVPs, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate and being technically proficient to do POC with hands-on-skills. 
• Proactively enables cross collaboration across teams to drive AI Design Wins and support the startup/ISV AI transformation inclusive of AI Applications and data foundation. Support the creation of new pipeline in collaboration with the Specialist and account team by identifying new opportunities within customer engagement and hand off to the Digital Native AE for pursuit.  
• Understanding the basic knowledge of Azure security principles and practices, have extensive experience in implementing and managing security measures within Azure environments. Strong understanding of identity and access management in Azure and familiarity with scripting and automation tools for security processes. Stay current with the latest Azure security trends, tools, and best practices. 
• Be the Trusted advisor and use proactive effort to find and understand the Startup/ISV’s pain points and work with partners to design and offer solutions (with business case) to technical leaders by being a Microsoft Intelligent Data and Analytics platform evangelist inclusive of new Data and Analytics projects, modernizing legacy Data Warehouse to the cloud, new Modern Data Warehousing deployments, real-time analytics, and end to end Data, Analytics and AI solutions. 
• Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices with Engineering, to remove key blockers and drive product improvements. 
• Maintain and grow expertise in Database scenarios including Cosmos DB, SQL DB, PostgreSQL and in Analytics, Data warehousing, Data Engineering, Data Science including Intelligent Data and Analytics Platform (Azure SQL DW, Lakehouse architecture, Fabric, Azure Databricks, Power BI), and relevant AI technologies while keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the Data & AI technical community.