Sr. Technology Specialists (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. 

Microsoft is revolutionizing customer experiences by leveraging AI to address challenges and enhance achievements. You will play a pivotal part, guiding customers through AI's potential to solve problems, boost efficiency, and drive innovation. By staying abreast of AI advancements and fostering collaborative relationships, sellers ensure customers fully harness AI's transformative power for actionable insights and industry success.  

The main goal of Microsoft Technology Specialists (TS) is to win the technical decision of customers to purchase and use our technology. The TS is expected to be able 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, 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.  

Responsibilities

• Own technical discussions with customers leveraging processes and tools, demos, and programs using consultative sales methodology and technical expertise to influence the customer vision; 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, 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 guiding the customer to choose the best Microsoft Intelligent Data and Analytics platform and win the AI Design, inclusive of Microsoft AI, Application services, and Databases.  
• 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; drive POCs/Pilots to create momentum for MVPs, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate and being technically proficient to do POC with hands-on-skills. 
• Support the creation of new pipeline in collaboration with the Specialist and account team by identifying new opportunities within customer engagement and handing off to the Solution Specialist for pursuit. 
• Be the Trusted advisor and find and understand customers’ pain points and work with partners to design and offer solutions (with business case) to technical leaders by being a Microsoft Intelligent Data and Analytics platform evangelist inclusive of new Data and Analytics projects, modernizing legacy Data Warehouse to the cloud, new Modern Data Warehousing deployments, real-time analytics, and end to end Data, Analytics and AI solutions.  
• 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 Database scenarios including Cosmos DB, SQL DB, PostgreSQL and in Analytics, Data warehousing, Data Engineering, Data Science including Intelligent Data and Analytics Platform (Azure SQL DW, Lakehouse architecture, Fabric, Azure Databricks, Power BI), and relevant AI technologies while keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the Data & AI technical community. 

Qualifications

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.

Required Qualifications (RQs) 

• Deep domain knowledge in Databases, Analytics, and AI:  
  • Understands Database Platforms: Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, IBM Db2, Snowflake, Cassandra DB, Maria DB, etc.  
  • Understands Analytics Platforms: Fabric, Azure Databricks, Snowflake, real-time analytics, Power BI) OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.  3+ years of hands-on programming experience (Scala, Python, SQL etc.) 
• 5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience 
  • OR Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience 
  • OR Masters Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience 
  • OR equivalent experience 
• 5+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises database infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management. 
  • Partners: Experience leveraging partner solutions to solve customer needs and scale opportunities. 
  • Proof of Concepts: Experience creating Database, Analytics, and AI Proof of Concepts (PoC)/Pilots for customers that lead to production deployments.  
• Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture) 
  • Azure Certifications: Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP 203) or or Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102) or Enterprise Data Analyst Associate (DP 600) or Azure Cosmos DB Developer Specialty (DP 420) or Fabric Analytics Engineering Associate (DP- 600).  
  • Knowledge of Competitive Database platforms such as AWS, GCP, Mongo DB, and Oracle. Knowledge of Competitive Intelligent Data and Analytics platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS (Redshift), GCP Big query, Teradata, Netezza, Exadata, Apache Spark, Tableau, Qlik, Looker, etc. including financial performance, key messaging, and roadmap. Knowledge of AI platforms (AWS, Google, IBM, and Oracle) Certifications: Google Cloud Professional ML Engineer, AWS Certified Machine learning, or IBM certified Data Science professional.  
• Strong Japanese and English communication Skill
  • Native Japanese read, write and verbal communication skill.
  • Business level English read, write and verbal communication skill.
  • Deliver presentation in both English and Japanese skills to non Japanese customers or Events that held in English.

Preferred Qualifications (PQs) 

• 5+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience 
  • OR equivalent experience 
• 5+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises database infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management. 
  • Partners: Experience leveraging partner solutions to solve customer needs and scale opportunities. 
  • Proof of Concepts: Experience creating Database, Analytics, and AI Proof of Concepts (PoC)/Pilots for customers that lead to production deployments.