Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft

Job Description

• Do you have a passion for Developer Services? Do you want to be a key technical leader in a rapidly growing & profitable “Enterprise” team? Do you want to work in a division that has a direct impact on Microsoft’s bottom-line? If you want to join a fast-paced team & have an impact on a growing our developer business, this is the opportunity for you to drive the evolution of Microsoft Developer Support while keeping customer satisfaction as the top priority! This is an opportunity for you to be part of the evolution of Azure and cloud support services, to be constantly challenged as the Developer Platforms expand to provide broader capabilities to our customers, enable customers using a service alongside on premise Microsoft Developer Platform products, and to work in collaboration with multiple Microsoft teams inside of Customer Service and Support and Engineering and Operations teams.
• The Premier Field Engineer role is strategic in nature, and as a trusted advisor to our Developer customers, you will suggest changes to better equip our Partners and Customers to gain productive use on our Developer platforms, and help influence in-market solutions today. In addition to helping drive supportability improvements into our customers’ solutions, you will also engage the engineering leadership within our customers and partners for strategic technical, architectural and design discussions, and drive strategic thought leadership. These strategic areas of focus will target our highest impact points for our Partners, Customers and other members. As a technical leader on this team you will be exposed to and responsible for several technologies in the Developer space!
• Beyond extensive technical and product focus, this role requires the ability to frame and communicate issues and recommendations clearly and concisely, show exceptional attention to detail, and demonstrate the ability to build broad relationships with the right influencers, leveraging those relationships to impact key business results for our business. The successful candidate will have a solid understanding of the competitive landscape and use this understanding to influence key decision makers in both Support and the Engineering Groups. You must be able to work well under pressure while also exhibiting flexibility with a strong tolerance for managing through ambiguity and uncertainty.
• At Microsoft, the sentence: “That’s not our problem” doesn’t exist in our lexicon. With thousands of employees, we deliver world-class assistance around the clock to our customers, partners and developers in 24 languages.
• The Developer Platform is strategic to Microsoft enabling customers to develop, test, and deploy solutions in both the cloud and on premise to take advantage of economies of scale, reliability, globally distributed data centers, and generally reduce the cost and effort of managing dedicated IT infrastructure.
• Developer Support is a strategic unit of Microsoft responsible for the following:
• The definition and implementation of the support services required to win in the developer and enterprise market place.
• Resolving customer issues including complex technical scenarios integrating several on premise and cloud capabilities (Windows, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, AppFabric, etc.) and scenarios supporting the service such as service availability, quality, outage management, subscription management, correlation of usage and charges, and cost efficient solution architecture.
• Provide critical product and solution feedback to multiple engineering and operations teams
• Lead the integration and collaboration diverse talented teams to resolve issues with specific technologies

Responsibilities

• The Premier Field Engineer is responsible for support delivery, providing technical support to Developer customers by resolving complex technical customer issues on the Microsoft developer platforms, and delivering Technical Support achieving high Customer Satisfaction and workflow efficiency targets; to identify required tools, access, training, processes or capabilities to assess and resolve customer issues.
• Team members will need to closely collaborate with engineering and operations teams as well as other support engineering teams.

Qualifications
Soft Skills:

• Leadership handle technically challenging and politically hot customer situations
• Strong communications skills Excellent spoken and written English communication skills
• Effective, polished interaction with customer both on the telephone and potentially face-to-face to gather information
• Superior problem solving and troubleshooting skills, an ability to use various data collection tools and methodologies to analyze problems and develop solutions
• Ability to work collaboratively with the Engineering teams to drive architectural changes throughout the environments to improve stability of each environment
• Outstanding partnering capabilities
• Ability to drive product/service improvements in core technical focus area
• Logical and Critical thinking, and demonstrated success in dealing with ambiguity and problem definition under continual deadline constraints
• Passion for technology and customer support
• Understanding of cloud vs. on premise computing

Technical Skills

• Knowledge of one or two of the following domains: ASP.NET, Windows Azure, Developer Languages and Tools including C#, C++, etc., .NET CLR fundamentals, etc. Prior OSS development is also encouraged.

ASP.NET

• .NET Framework 2.0 4.x
• ASP.NET
• IIS 6-7.x
• WCF
• Data access technologies

Windows Azure:

• Windows Azure architecture and its components (Fabric, Compute, Storage)
• Knowledge of Windows Azure Platform services
• Azure Platform development and deployment concepts
• Familiarity with development: tools, language, process, methods, troubleshooting

Developer Languages and Tools (TFS, ALM):

• Visual Studio and compilers
• TFS
• C# and managed code development
• Familiarity with C++

.NET CLR:

• CLR fundamentals including Garbage Collection, memory management

Experience

• At least 3 years of experience in engaging in senior level technology decision maker discussions, deep experience with the design, development and troubleshooting/debugging of core Microsoft (competitive technology is an asset) software systems. including experience in a customer-facing consultancy or customer technical support role, plus minimum 6 years of experience in enterprise systems development, including enterprise architecture.
• Demonstrated technical competence with MSFT development platforms
• Experience leading a development team

Education/Certification

• B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• MCSD or other applicable advanced certification is a Plus