The Azure Storage Devices Support Escalation Engineer is responsible for technical leadership and support delivery, providing technical support to StorSimple/Azure Data Box/Avere customers by resolving technical issues against CPE and workflow efficiency targets. The StorSimple/Azure Data Box/Avere Support Escalation Engineer will need to closely collaborate with PG engineering and operations, and other CTS engineers. Specific measurements include achieving the CPE team goals, work on escalations and provide a good technical solution, enabling a response time similar to competitors; maintaining technical skills through completion of ongoing readiness and Platform training; and, in general participating in the creation of future Microsoft support capabilities for the cloud. To be more specific:

Customer Issue Resolution & Responsiveness

Drive the communication with the customer to ensure the customer has confidence on problem resolution provided by Microsoft.

Define and understand the customer issue by creating the adequate reproduction scenarios.

Research, troubleshoot, develop, and implement a workaround (if needed) and gain agreement from customer on problem resolving. 

Be ready to work with Support Engineers on complex issues and drive the communication and resolution to the customer as a Technical Leader

Effective Communication & Collaboration

Identify the right resource to collaborate with for tough & political hot problem.

Collaborate with cross-group peers both proactively and reactively.

Produce quality documentation and share with the appropriate team members and tech lead as appropriate.  Maintain a constructive and positive attitude all the time

Maintain a constructive and positive attitude all the time

Training & Readiness

Identify current knowledge deficiencies/training needs, as well as potential future needs.

Work with your manager, as appropriate to assess your own core competencies and identify current knowledge deficiencies/training needs, as well as potential future needs.

Work with your manager and Tech Advisor (where appropriate) to develop a comprehensive personal/technical development plan.

Implement your development plan, actively seek development opportunities, and complete all scheduled training.

Meet with your manager to assess and adjust the plan as needed to match mid- and long-term career plans. 

Work with Service Technical Advisors on the training readiness and help contribute to bring its content to perfection.

Create training sessions / brown bags on different subjects based on the training need identified and be a point of contact for the subjects / trainings that are presented to the team.

Operational Precision

Adhere to published queue or call back schedule and be available for different shifts, as necessary.

Use appropriate documentation and utilization and / or labor tracking methods to account for time.

Manage and prioritize your workload while keeping team members and management appropriately informed.

Participate in ad-hoc projects per management request or business need.

Be a global, trusted advisor to our customers and to the team by handling complex, high-profile situations. In addition to solving their reported issues, identify any misconfiguration at their environment and recommend proven solutions / work around for a greater customer impact.

Responsibilities

• Help solve technically complex, strategic, high-profile or long-running customer cases that may require interaction with Software Engineering

• Responsible for the customer support experience with Microsoft

• Own, troubleshoot and solve customer technical issues, using collaboration, troubleshooting best practices and transparency within and across teams (e.g. swarming)

• Identify cases that require escalation (either technically or strategically)

• Create and maintain incident management requests to product group or engineering group

• Contribute to case deflection initiatives, automation and other digital self-help assets to improve customer and engineer experience

• Provide ramp activities, knowledge sharing, technical coaching and mentoring

• Drive technical collaboration and engagement outside of CSS (Product Engineering teams, Services, Support, Regions)

• Lead or participate in building communities with peer delivery roles; may be workload or specialty specific

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 to gather information

Demonstrable troubleshooting skills

Cross-team collaboration

Logical and Critical thinking

Passion for technology and customer support 

Understanding of cloud vs. on premise computing.  

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Knowledge of one or two of the following domains: Storage, Operating System/Virtualization, Networking, Microsoft Azure Platform Familiarity with SAN/NAS, Hyper-V/VMWare, iSCSI

Familiarity / Experience with OS Internals concepts (Windows, Linux, etc), Storage, Active Directory and Security

Understanding of Virtualization concepts and virtual system administration

Understanding of Storage Concepts and Storage Administration

Experience with VM configuration and administration Networking and shares (SMB, NFS, CIFS, etc)

Experience with networking concepts including VIPs, NAT, DNS 

Experience with networking tools (ping, tracert, tracemon, wire shark, etc.)

Experience with IoT/Azure Iot

Experience with Kubernetes

Working before with Azure VMs is a plus

Microsoft Azure Platform (as a plus)

Microsoft Azure architecture and its components (Fabric, Compute, Storage, etc)

Knowledge of Microsoft Azure Platform services 

Azure Platform development and deployment concepts  

Links about Azure Storage Devices Products:

Microsoft Storsimple: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storsimple/#overview

Microsoft Azure Databox: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/databox/

Microsoft Azure Stack Edge: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack/edge

Microsoft Avere: Avere Systems | Home (microsoft.com)

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.

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.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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.