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 TS 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 TS, 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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discussions with customers leveraging processes and tools, demos, and programs; using consultative sales methodology and technical expertise to understand the customer needs and demonstrate how Microsoft solutions can address them; establish rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams.
  • Be the Trusted advisor and use proactive effort to find and understand customers’ pain points, and design and offer solutions (with business case) to technical leaders.
  • Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices with Engineering, to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.
• Build technical strategy: map the agreed customer vision into a strategy, resolve concerns, prevent & remove technical blockers, validate a strong business case for investment and translate technology complexity into business impact. Work with the customer, account team, and partners to orchestrate a roadmap for implementation using Microsoft Analytics Governance (MAG) framework. Educate our customers on the NoSQL value proposition in general and particularly on Azure Cosmos DB.
• Drive technical assessments to create a map of the current landscape and to build the technical migration & modernization plans, thus building a solid business case.
• Design the solution using your technical knowledge, architectural approach, consultancy skills and our methodology to win a customer’s technical decision and meet the customer’s needs. Ensure technical decision makers agree with proposed architecture. Drive POCs/pilots to create momentum for MVPs, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate and being technically proficient to conduct and complete a POC with hands-on-skills. Articulate the end-to-end architecture, including both Apps and Data services (Azure Cosmos DB & OSS DB)
  • Identify new opportunities within customer engagement.
• Maintain and grow expertise in Data Modernization (Azure Cosmos DB and Open Source DB), Analytics & Data warehousing scenarios including Intelligent 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) while keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the Data & AI technical community.
• Be an Azure platform evangelist for Analytics & Data Warehousing scenarios like modernizing your legacy Data Warehouse and migrating to the cloud, new Modern Data Warehousing deployments and end to end analytics solutions.
• Scale through partners, acting as liaison between the partner and account team and facilitating partner resources and processes; supporting partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Fluency in Dutch is essential
• Relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience  
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering
• OR related field AND technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience  
• OR equivalent experience.  
• Deep domain expertise in one of the Data-specific areas, such as SQL Server, deployments and migrations to the cloud, Open-source database deployments and migrations, Cloud Scale Analytics, Data Governance, etc. OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level
• Hands-on experience and technical expertise with respective products and technologies
• Working knowledge of Azure and/or competitive cloud technologies

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Certification in relevant (Microsoft or industry) technologies or disciplines (e.g., 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.
• Certification in one or more of the following technologies: Azure Data, Analytics, Big Data.

Language Requirment: Dutch and English

Location: Dublin, Ireland

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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.

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