Data & AI Technical Specialist

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Microsoft’s Commercial Solution Area (CSA) sets the sales strategy, leads technical sales, and operations as a hub for the Commercial Solution Areas and Support Services that power the Microsoft Cloud. We work closely with other Microsoft teams and partners, especially Customer Success, Marketing, to ensure those solutions meet our customers’ needs.

The main goal of a Microsoft Technology Specialist (TS) is to win the technical decision of customers to purchase and use Microsoft technology and cloud services. The TS is expected to both own and win customers’ technical 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. Being part of this team will allow you to maintain and develop your deep technical expertise across Microsoft and non-Microsoft cloud-based technologies.

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 (RQs/MQs)

• Previous experience in technical pre-sales or technical consulting
• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (or equivalent qualification) combined with technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience

Additional or Preferred Qualifications (PQs)

• Deep domain knowledge in SQL, Analytics and AI plus hands-on experience working with the respective products at an expert level. Additionally deep knowledge/experience of the competitive landscape and partner solutions in this space.
• Experience creating Data & AI Proof of Concepts (PoC), Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers that lead to production deployments.
• Excellent Communicator: Demonstrates executive presence, presentation skills, deep technical product demo abilities, written and verbal communication skills.
• Collaborative: Works cohesively with customers, the Microsoft account team, and Microsoft partners. Helps others succeed by identifying and promoting innovative solutions and strategies.
• Relationship Building: 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.

• Own technical discussions for Azure Data & AI solutions with customers leveraging processes and tools, demos, and programs; use consultative and/or Challenger method; establish rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams.
• Build strategy: map the agreed customer 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 the customer, account team, and partners to orchestrate a roadmap for implementation.
• Drive technical assessments to create a map of the current landscape and to build the technical migration plans, thus building a solid migration 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 and on the migration plan. Drive Proof of Concepts (POC) and Minimal Viable Products (MVP).
• Scale through partners, acting as liaison between the partner and account team, facilitating partner resources and processes; supporting partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams.
• Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with the Engineering team to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.
• Identify and Support the creation of new pipeline within customer engagements in collaboration with the Specialist.