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, open-source databases and Azure Analytics platform including Azure Cosmos DB, and Microsoft Fabric. 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.

Responsibilities

Scale Customer Engagments:

· Engages with customer technical decision makers and anticipates customer needs and issues proactively through data gathering.

· Uses knowledge of customer context and solution or portfolio expertise to build credibility with customers individually or at scale. Develops technical and market/industry knowledge.

· Ensures technical wins for core technologies by driving technical discussions with customers. Improves customer interactions through feedback and observation.

· Engages other internal resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center, demo sites, virtual sites), mapping out and leveraging foundational resource knowledge for key areas of technology as needed to overcome technical blockers on assigned technology set.

Scale Through Partners:

· Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by contributing to the facilitation of technical engagements and partnering with colleagues to manage the sales process.

Build Strategy:

· Shares competitive insights from customer sessions with colleagues and escalates/resolves competitive situations to influence compete strategies.

· Provides strategic, technical input based on Microsoft capability to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner and internal teams.

· Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC) by driving new feedback, blockers, insights, resource (e.g., OneList) items across communities so they can be added and prioritized.

· Works with account teams to tailor Microsoft messaging to audience and captures and shares customer feedback using knowledge of specific Microsoft solutions and their context in a competitive landscape.

· Collaborates with team members to monitor and analyze customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customer’s business outcomes. Identifies opportunities to promote usage.

Solution Design and Proof:

· Identifies and applies existing demonstration assets. Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions [ADS], proof of concept [POC] sessions) of solutions based on specific Microsoft products through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment. Reviews partner demonstrations and provides feedback to ensure alignment with Microsoft standards.

· Presents and applies reference architectures across technologies/solution areas to partners or customers for their technology sets.

· Expands awareness of and begins practicing digital transformation sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales).

Technical Leadership:

· 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.

· Conducts group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, Webinars) or leverages existing scale enablement programs to present and educate customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits across Microsoft solutions/products.

· Monitors and responds to internal and external tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathon, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area. Contributes and participates in Customer Executive Briefing Center sessions. Shares best practices internally on community calls and drives recognition of Microsoft cloud solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences.

Other · Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• o 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.
• Experience in relevant (Microsoft or industry) technologies or disciplines (e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).
• 2+ 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  
• Advanced English level is required.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

•  7+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting, or related experience.
•  4+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• Certification in relevant (Microsoft or industry) technologies or disciplines (e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture) OR equivalent experience. 
•  Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e., Jenkins, Azure Developer Services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e., Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub).
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs.
• Certifications in one or more of the following technologies: Azure Data, Analytics, Big Data.

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.