SQL Engineer

The Analytics Platform System (APS) team is looking to expand to accommodate our rapidly growing customer base. APS is Microsoft's solution to the high end data warehousing market.   The APS team provides an end to end solution consisting of both hardware and software support to meet our customer’s data warehousing needs.   The APS support team is part of the CSS organization that caters exclusively to tier 1 customers and provides an all-encompassing support model for the APS appliance. We are looking for a Support Engineer to help us move the APS support organization forward and improve the experience for our customers.

As a Support Engineer, you will work closely with the worldwide APS PFE team, APS product group, as well as the escalation teams of the included products such as SQL and Windows Server. The technologies supported on this team include Windows clustering, networking, active directory and SQL Server components such as T-SQL, SSIS, etc. providing a complete Appliance centric model of support. 

Responsibilities:

•      Represent Microsoft and communicate with corporate customers via telephone, written correspondence, or electronic service regarding technically complex escalated problems identified in Microsoft software products, and manage relationships with those customers. Frequently, these problems will not only be technically complex, but will be politically charged situations requiring the highest level of customer focus skills
•      Receive escalated, technically complex mission critical or politically hot customer issues, and maintain ownership of issue until resolved completely.
•      Engage & coordinate resources from other product support teams as needed to resolve complex, multi-product customer issues.
•      Represent Microsoft professionally during occasional customer facing on-site engagements.
•      Act as technical lead, mentor, and role model to engineers on the team.
•      Develop and deliver technical content and training for the PFE field, account teams and support team. (i.e. KB articles, Technical Triages & managed IP)
•      Maintain strong working knowledge of pre-release products and take ownership for product improvement in key product areas.
•      Report software bugs and customer product enhancements to the Product Group.
•      Write complex technical articles, sample scripts and diagnostic rules to improve engineer and customer product knowledge and supportability.
•      Assist with selection of new team members.
•      May act as technical focal point in cooperative relationships with other companies.
Required:
•      Candidates must also have strong customer service, accurate and logical problem solving, communication skills, and the ability to work in a team environment.
•      Minimum of 3 years of experience in systems development, data warehousing, software support or I.T. consulting.
•      Solid understanding of SQL Server or Windows Server, Failover Clustering, Virtualization, Networking and AD technology fundamentals.
•      Knowledge of basic hardware concepts such as RAID, storage and hardware troubleshooting.
•      Previous experience deploying, administrating and/or supporting an enterprise data warehouse solution desired.
•      Ability to analyze and interpret data captures and logs to resolve customer issues in production environments specific to SQL query performance, authentication, network connectivity, Windows clustering and virtualization.
•      Initiative to develop expertise on new technologies beyond the provided classroom training.
•      Full Microsoft certifications for the products we support is required within one year of employment.
•      Occasional night and weekend on-call work availability required.
•      Travel up to 10% may be required.

Candidates with strong and lengthy experience in supporting complex, enterprise products solutions for 3 or more years will be considered even when all the above qualifications may not be present.   The preferred candidate will have depth in two or more of the technologies areas that make up the APS appliance.   

Qualifications: 

•      4-year technical degree or equivalent work experience in technical support or MIS in an Enterprise environment required. 
•      Demonstrated technical competency in SQL or Windows is a must. (Windows Clustering, Active Directory, Networking and Virtualization is a plus) 
•      Ability to effectively communicate with customer managers and executives on technical and business issues. 
•      MCSE(D) or other applicable advanced certification is a plus.
•      Strong technical writing and presentation skills required.
•      Strong organizational, time management, project management, and negotiation skills.