Support Escalation Engineer

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers' expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft's portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

Within CE&S, the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support experience. In CSS, we are powered by Microsoft's AI technology to help consumers, businesses, partners, and more, resolve their issues quickly and securely, helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

In the Customer Service & Support (CSS) team we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Senior Technical Support Engineer, you will own, troubleshoot and solve complex customer technical issues. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, hone your problem-solving, collaboration and research skills, and deepen your technical proficiency.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.

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

• Represent Microsoft and communicate with corporate customers via telephone, written correspondence, or electronic service to provide in-depth technical support for complex escalated problems identified in Microsoft software products or services and manage relationships with those customers. Occasionally, these problems will not only be technically complex, but will be politically charged situations requiring the highest level of customer focus skills.
• Provide advanced troubleshooting to analyses problems and develop solutions to meet customer needs.
• Receive escalated, technically complex mission critical or politically hot customer issues, and maintain ownership of issue until resolved completely.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of products and report software bugs and customer product enhancements to the Product Group.
• May act as technical focal point in cooperative relationships with other companies.
• Determine the best approach for resolving complex technical issues that will yield the desired turn-around time and optimal customer solution while minimizing the impact to the customer.
• Engage and collaborate with other Microsoft groups, including escalation teams and the R&D Team, and 3rd party support partner (Open Source), in gaining resolution to critical, complex issues.
• Provide exceptional customer service in politically charged environments.
• Create advanced online technical content including Knowledge Base articles, training documents, blogs, etc., as needed to help enhance our CSS Front of Funnel strategy and drive one-to-many customer and partner impact.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of all related products, technologies and upcoming releases. Take proactive ownership in identifying and recommending product improvements in key product areas based on key data points.
• Present technical content to various audiences including customers, partners, and internal stakeholders.
• Provide consulting services to partners and customers to increase product market share.
• Participate in planned team-wide shift rotations to cover business needs, including "after hour on-call" responsibilities and weekend work, with the ability to work a flexible schedule, cover weekends, public holiday and/or cover shift arrangement.
• This job required for shift arrangement, shift may change in the future based on business needs.

Qualifications

• Adaptability, flexibility and the ability to do the right thing under pressure and tight deadlines.
• Great interpersonal and communication skills-both oral and written-and success in partnering with groups inside and outside of Microsoft.
• A self-motivated and independent thinker that shows initiative and routinely translates circumstances and understanding into actions that move the business forward in a measurable manner.
• Ability to distil, prioritize and act on feedback from a variety of sources.
• Conviction and courage to drive decisions and defend positions as appropriate.
• Strong customer service skills, accurate and logical problem solving, and communication skills, plus the ability to excel in a team environment is essential
• Strong troubleshooting skills of complex technical issues involving multiple technologies
• Collaborative and inclusive mindset
• Ability to handle high pressure situations well, while maintaining calm and composure in stressful situations is a must.
• Strong ability to lead, perform, and deliver results in high pressure situations with multiple parties involved
• Ability to handle multiple customer issues and effectively balance your priority need.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in any STEM related field that has a significant computing element

Required (but not limited to the below) Skills & experience in the following areas:

• MS SQL Server DBA experience
• Installing, upgrading & updating SQL Server
• Configuring & Administrating SQL Server and SQL Server on Azure VM as per best practices.
• Backup Strategies
• Performance Tuning & optimizing.
• High Availability & DR solutions (AlwaysOn Availability Groups, FCI, Windows Server Clustering Service, Replication, LogShipping)
• Security (Encryption at rest(TDE), Encryption in transit(SSL))
• Compression
• Understanding of Database properties and advanced configuration options
• Table Partitioning

Note: This job required weekend shift and outside office hours on-call rotation coverage.

To be eligible for this role, applicants must be Australian citizens or New Zealand citizens who are legally entitled to work in Australia without any restrictions.

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 below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.