Senior Azure ACE Engineer

Every minute of every day, customers stake their entire business and reputation on Microsoft Cloud. The Engineering Operations (EngOps) team believes that when we meet our high standards for quality and reliability, our customers win. If we falter, our customers fail their end-customers. Our vision is to turn Microsoft Cloud customers into fans.

We are customer obsessed problem-solvers. We orchestrate deep engagements in areas like incident management, support and enablement. We analyze and amplify those customer voices, both within our own team, and across the Cloud + AI team, bringing the customer connection to the Quality vision for Azure. We innovate ways to scale what we learn across our customer base. Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are, how we work, and what we enable our customers to achieve. We know that empowering our customers starts with empowering our team to show up authentically, work in ways that are best for them, and achieve their career goals.

Would you like to join one of the fastest-growing teams within Microsoft Azure Engineering? Are you constantly customer-obsessed, and focused on enhancing customer experience? Are you passionate about cloud computing and love the challenge of solving the most complex technical problems?

Come join us and surround yourself with people who are passionate about cloud computing and believe that extraordinary support is critical to customer success.

As a customer focused Senior Advanced Cloud Engineer, you are the primary support and engineering contact accountable for the customer’s Azure support experience driving resolution of complex critical problems and supporting key customer projects on Azure. You will also act as the voice of the customer within Azure to escalate problems and to drive prioritization of platform/support improvement needs for customers.

In this role, you will work together with field teams (Customer Success Account Managers, Cloud Solution Architects, Support Escalation Engineers) and Azure engineering teams with our mission to turn Azure customers into fans with a world-class engineering-led support experience.

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.

Technical Oriented 
Utilizes engineering tools, customer telemetry and direct input. Flags the patterns of defects/signals in the products or issues across customers. Inform customers and partners about the complex thematic active issues, progress made on them and discuss next steps.
Synthesize feedback from customers and partners to learn about the product usage and identify and resolve feature and knowledge gaps and key performance indicators (KPIs) in the current product. Leads team in sharing insights and best practices with customers and partners on these service improvements.
Recommend changes to content improvement or troubleshooting guides and develops metrics to evaluate the changes.

Customer Solution Lifecycle Management 
Utilizes cross systems to conduct health checks to ensure the customer environment (e.g., product, service, feature) is optimized and configured for deployment. Provides guidance to customers on understanding and implementing new versions. Serves as a connecting point between the engineering team and customers throughout the solution’s lifecycle. Utilizes any resources to respond and resolve the immediate issues throughout the solution lifecycle. Proactively provides guidance to customers on designing configurations and deploying solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Handles complex escalations on customer issues from the support or field teams. Conducts impact analysis to determine the priority of the escalations.
Conducts deep root cause analysis of the issues and converts them into improvement opportunities. Serves as an escalation resource in areas of subject matter expertise. Represents the team on highly complex issues and answers a large variety of technical questions and concerns.

Relationship/Experience Management 
Acts as a voice of customers and leverages customers' feedback to provide input on business plans developed by the relevant product and business groups. Identifies customer usage patterns and driving resolutions on reoccurring customer issues with engineering and product and business groups. Leads their team in engaging with feature and product groups on redesign/customer requested changes for Microsoft products. Close the loop of feedback with the customers on product features.
Partners with other teams (e.g., program managers, software engineers, product, customer service support [CSS] teams) prioritize and drive resolutions of complex, high-impact customer issues and integration of customer features into the products. Leads discussions with stakeholders on customer progression and provide expertise on resolutions plans for common types of customer issues. Proactively communicates the translation of signals into actionable insights/trends to product teams to improve service reliability. Leads coordination with stakeholders (e.g., engineering/product teams) to develop mechanisms that improve customer health engagement and reduce the turnover time.

Required Qualifications:

10+ years of demonstrated IT experience supporting and troubleshooting enterprise level, mission-critical applications resolving complex issues/situations and driving technical resolution across cross-functional organizations.
6+ years’ experience in an external customer / client facing role.
2+ years of experience working on cloud computing technologies.

Technical Skills: Cloud computing technologies. 
Core IaaS: Compute, Storage, Networking, High Availability, Azure Kubernetes Service 
Data Platform and Bigdata: SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, HDInsight/Hadoop, Machine Learning, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory / Data Bricks, Cosmos DB
Azure PaaS Services: Redis Cache, Service Bus, Event Hub, Cloud Service, IoT suite, Mobile Apps, etc.

Communication skills: ability to empathize with customers and convey confidence. Able to explain highly technical issues to varied audiences. Able to prioritize and advocate customer’s needs to the proper channels. Take ownership and work towards a resolution.
Customer Obsession: Passion for customers and focus on delivering the right customer experience.
Growth Mindset: Openness and ability to learn new skills and technologies in a fast-paced environment.

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required 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.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.