Senior Service Engineer

Overview 

Microsoft has an exciting opportunity for an experienced service engineer to join the International Sovereign Platform Team (ISPT) working on mission critical and highly assured distributed systems.  Specifically, you will help design, deliver and support the operations infrastructure underpinning the sovereign clouds Microsoft delivers around the world and provide critical operational and support services. 

The ISPT are a growing international team within the Microsoft Azure Edge & Platform organisation.  We deliver specialised cloud environments, known as sovereign clouds, that are designed to comply with the data laws of specific countries and regions.  You would be part of the applications team responsible for enabling secure cross-domain data transfer between the Azure public cloud and the sovereign clouds and the sovereign cloud operations infrastructure. 

These capabilities enable secure data transfer between platforms, and have critical and demanding security, sovereignty, monitoring and control requirements. Coupled with the challenges of supporting complex environments across disparate security domains, these roles create exciting complex engineering and service support challenges you can solve with us! 

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. 

Qualifications 

Required: 

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent and multiple years of hands-on experience in designing, building and operating complex IT environments. 

• Deep knowledge and experience deploying/configuring and maintaining: Active Directory, Group Policy, WSUS, MECM, Windows Desktop deployments and application installations. 

• Experience with system and service management in high security domains. 

• Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or any other equivalent Cloud Certification
• Very good German and English skills, with good communication skills in reading/writing of the German language

Desired: 

• Deep experience in system and service administration of complex platforms. 

• A passion for innovation in complex and constrained environments, to deliver advanced and progressive customer experiences. 

• Experience working in broad domains including security, software, networking and service design. 

• Extensive experience of service support, with on-call responsibilities.  

• Expertise experience in problem solving and analysing distributed systems and critical production service environments.    

• Systems shell scripting experience (Bash, PowerShell, Python) and Dev Ops suites such as Ansible or equivalent. 

• DevOps experience, including continuous configuration automation. 

• Azure deployment knowledge including Bicep and Arm templates. 

Security Clearance Requirements: 

Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements 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. 

• Customer or government screening requirements as needed over time. 

Other Requirements:

• This role will require access to information that is controlled for export under export control regulations, potentially under the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations or Export
  Administration Regulations, the EU Dual Use Regulation, and/or other export control regulations. As a condition of employment, the successful candidate will be required to provide either proof of their country of citizenship or proof of their U.S. permanent residency or other protected status (e.g., under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)) for assessment of eligibility to access the export-controlled information. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport. Lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees may verify status using other documents, where applicable.
• This position requires verification of citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports German government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport

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.

Responsibilities 

• You’ll be a critical member of a geo-distributed team responsible for designing, implementing and supporting operations capabilities within high-assurance, secure and highly-available environments.  Your role as a senior engineer will mean you are responsible for the outcomes the team delivers as well as ensuring other team members grow and learn to deliver better outcomes themselves. 

• You’ll be responsible for championing, implementing and refining DevOps practices in order to improve operational efficiency while ensuring other requirements, such as security, are not compromised. 

• You’ll lead design, code and security reviews across teams to identify risks and prevent classes of bugs prior to release by applying expertise in application design, security, and other relevant technologies.  

• You’ll understand the capabilities and limitations of existing tools and resources, and the customer impact of design trade-offs and exceptions, to drive and optimise team decision making. 

• You’ll actively drive 24/7/365 support, which means participating in rotating on-call duties. Your responsiveness and problem-solving skills will be crucial. 

• Collaboration across the global organization is essential. You’ll be a contact point between teams, driving cross-team information sharing and process reuse in order to enhance efficiency and consistency. 

• Working closely with security teams, you’ll ensure adherence to security standards. This involves integrating security practices into all aspects of your work. By maintaining a strong security posture, you’ll protect critical assets. 

• You should expect to need to travel to the in-country Sovereign Operations Centres on a regular basis. This physical presence is vital for effective coordination, monitoring, and collaboration within the centre.  Exact frequency to be agreed,  but needs to be frequent enough to build strong relationships with the customer teams there.
• Expect up to 25% onsite travel.  This will be travel to the in-country Sovereign Operations Centres on a regular basis. This physical presence is vital for effective coordination, monitoring, and collaboration with the centre.  Exact frequency to be agreed,  but needs to be frequent enough to build strong relationships with the customer teams there.