Technical Specialist – Data & AI

Are you passionate about helping customers transform their businesses? Microsoft is at the forefront of this transformation; come and help organizations rethink aspects of their business in a way that sets them and their people up for success. The main goal of Microsoft Technological Specialists (TS) 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. We are seeking a Technical Specialist Data & AI to join our team. 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/Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).
• Experience with NoSQL DB understanding and practical hands-on implementation experience at the expert level.
• Azure Certifications: Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP 203) or Enterprise Data Analyst Associate (DP 500) or Azure Cosmos DB Developer Specialty (DP 420) or equivalent industry certifications preferred.
• Knowledge of Data and Analytics platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, MongoDB Atlas, Cassandra, Datastax, AWS Dynamo DB, Neo4J, StarDog, AWS (Redshift), GCP Big query, Teradata, Netezza, Exadata, Apache Spark, Tableau, Qlik, Looker, etc.
• Experience leveraging partner solutions to solve customer needs and scale opportunities.
• Experience creating NoSQL and Analytics Proof of Concepts (PoC)/Pilots for customers that lead to production deployments.
• Experience in developing highly optimized application code for NoSQL solutions.
• Working knowledge with C#, Java, NodeJS, Python languages for NoSQL implementation.
• Knowledge of Open-Source DB (Azure Database for PostgreSQL/MySQL, Azure Redis Cache) solutions.
• Deep domain knowledge in NoSQL & Analytics Platforms (Azure Synapse, Azure Data Explorer, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Power BI).
• 3+ years of hands-on programming experience (Scala, Python, SQL etc.).
• Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior executives.
• Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects.
• The ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.

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.

• Build technical strategy: map the agreed customer vision into a strategy, resolve concerns, prevent & remove technical blockers, validating a business case for investment and translating 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.
• 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.
• Maintain and grow expertise in Data Modernization (Azure Cosmos DB and Open Source DB), Analytics & Data warehousing scenarios including Intelligent Data Platform (Azure SQL DW, Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics/Azure Databricks, Power BI), 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.
• Develop customer technical skilling plan in collaboration with customer and account team.

Other Embody our culture and values.