Microsoft Platform Engineer Lead

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

Customer Engineers provide technical leadership for Premier customers around the world to help ensure their IT environments are kept optimized and healthy. The focus is to do this in a proactive and consultative manner to avoid future issues. This includes guidance on best practices, risk assessments, migrations, and onsite, remote and dedicated support services.

What we do best:

Customer Engineers provide various services to our Enterprise customers to increase systems availability, resolve critical issues, and ultimately improve the health of our customers’ environments. We consult with experienced technical staff to ensure they have the skills to troubleshoot and maintain their solution in line with Microsoft best practices. When things do go wrong we provide rapid on site expertise to resolve critical situations.

Customer Engineers deliver onsite and dedicated services for Microsoft’s Premier customers.

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.

Responsibilities

• Be part of a thriving practice thats constantly looking for ways to improve our customers’ experience
• Work with customers to identify business requirements
• Develop and maintain a Service Delivery Plan to maximize the value of services to our Enterprise customers.
• Optimize customer’s current solutions and infrastructure
• Take a leadership role supporting customers on projects
• Mentor other engineers to share your knowledge and experience
• Provide the following services:
  • Proactive Services: Services which promote customer health through Risk Assessments, Health Checks, Code Reviews, or other similar offerings
  • Dedicated Support: Engagements that strengthen customer relationships and IT infrastructure & application effectiveness through dedicated support delivery
  • Perform patching and upgrade guidance and assistance
  • Ad hoc Services: Short and time limited engagements focused towards customer specific issue remediation or support (e.g. Chalk Talks, Proof of Concept)
  • Workshops and Training: Deliver technical training for customer knowledge transfer and for helping customers to consume Microsoft products and services

Responsibilities for this Role Also Include:

• • Engaging and connecting the vendor Customer Engineers with the Account teams and assist on customer delivery planning.
  • Identify business opportunities, including opportunities to drive adoption of our cloud technologies.
  • Lead Pod members and manage the relationship with the customer, including monthly reviews and opportunities.
  • Fulfill Team Leader responsibilities – vendor recruitment (including the timely ramping-up of team members and hiring / onboarding / offboarding based on demand), project tracking, delivery management, education, time approval, and customer / CSAM reporting. Coordinate Pod teams planning sessions and relationship with customers.
  • Promote technical collaboration among Pod members.
  • Contribute to the team and business through leading innovation and delivery improvements (example: improvements on the Pod delivery model, further shaping the Pod Lead role).

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 4+ years experience in systems development, network operations, software support, technical support, product development, or I.T. consulting with a working knowledge of:
  
  • Understanding of Patch Management and experience with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
    
  • Windows Server Operating System knowledge which includes understanding of NTFS/Share Permissions, File Sharing, Performance Monitoring, Event logging, Task Manager, Windows Firewall, User and Group Management, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, or related field
  • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Possess deep technical expertise in at least one technical specialty and can solve complex technical problems through sound, creative troubleshooting and providing workarounds and escalations as required.
• Set an example of excellence as a Microsoft representative, enhancing the companys image and reputation through your credibility, preparation, commitment, and first-class delivery.
• Demonstrate strong communication skills; ability to develop strategic on-going customer relationships, gain trust and respect for the company. Engineers must also possess strong technical writing, presentation and training skills.
• Enjoy team work, and actively contribute to their peer group as well as our customer account teams.
• Communicate at all levels from CIO to the technical staff on the ground.
• Proven track record in successfully planning, deploying, operating, and optimizing on-premises environments
• Proven track record of building relationships with senior IT and business decision makers.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to explain complex topics in ways that can be understood by technical and business decision makers.
• Windows client , windows server (2016, 2019), clusters, and Virtualization:
  • Experience with Deployment technologies like WDS, MDT, Crash Dump Analysis and High Availability technologies like storage Backup Hyper-V.
  • Expertise on Storage SAN NAS DAS understanding of storage stack its architecture.
  • Virtualization (Hyper-V) : Monolithic and Microkernel ,Hyper-V ring Architecture.
  • VHD and AVHDX Merging Checking integrity with its differencing chain.
  • Failover, Planned Failover, Test Failure, Unplanned Failover.
  • Hyper-V Migration.
  • Windows as a service with its deployment rings concepts, co-management with MEMCM is an added advantage.
  • Troubleshooting windows updates issues and understanding of Component based servicing.
  • Understanding of WMI and familiarity with WMI queries
  • Active Directory concepts such as Kerberos, LDAP, Sites and Security Groups.
  • Understanding of TCP/IP and other networking services: DNS, WINS, DHCP, Routing.
  • Familiar with status messages and various server and client-side logs used for troubleshooting.
  • Hands on with popular Sysinternal utilities to find RCA for performance related bottlenecks.
  • Cloud Fundamentals.
  • Windows networking.

The salary for this role in the state of Colorado is between $119,200 – $178,800 USD

At Microsoft, certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These awards are allocated based on individual performance. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role.

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.

Benefits/perks listed here may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.US-based employees gain access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan and company match, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, and fitness benefits, among others.