Global Black Belt Technology Specialist – Azure AI Services/Azure Open AI Full-time

As a Global Black Belt (GBB) Technology Specialist – Azure AI Services/Azure Open AI, you will be a technical solution expert within our worldwide AI commercial solution area organization working with strategic customers on establishing their AI Strategy & prioritizing use cases that drive business value with Azure AI Services (Vision, Speech, Language etc.) & Generative AI (including strategic AI partner solutions). Specifically, you will lead strategic technical customer engagements that will require you to deliver architectural design sessions, pilots/POCs leveraging Azure AI Services and Azure OpenAI Services. You’ll create Generative AI-powered applications that are enhanced by the broader AI portfolio, with the goal of demonstrating the value of a business use case for your customers. You will collaborate with a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to advance the decision process and increase the adoption of the Azure AI services/Azure Open AI with customers. You will work within your team as a subject matter expert to help customers derive value through AI. You will have experience in customer-facing roles and success leading deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, Data Scientist and Developers.

This role sits in our Global Black Belt (GBB) organization, which is a team of highly specialized & technical professionals within our Microsoft Customer & Partner Solutions organization (MCAPS) who work with customers to enable some of the most complex and innovative solutions, providing differentiated technical leadership and guidance along the way. The AI team within the GBB organization consists of Specialist and Technology experts, who focus on specific domains, industries, and workloads, such as Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Services, Application Development and Machine Learning.

This role will require travel to customer sites.

Are you interested in helping to shape the era of AI? From healthcare to manufacturing to education and constituent services, AI is transforming entire industries and fundamentally changing the way we live and work. Microsoft is helping customers embrace this opportunity and transform their businesses. Trusted by organizations around the world to run mission-critical application workloads, Azure is the place where organizations can build with AI securely, responsibly, and with confidence.

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:

• Provide in-depth AI expertise to support the technical relationship with Azure customers, including product and solution briefings, creating demos, proof-of-concept work, and partner directly with product management to prioritize solutions impacting customer adoption to Azure AI Services (Cognitive services portfolio, Azure Open AI.)
• Recommend integration strategies, enterprise architectures, platforms, and application infrastructure required to successfully implement a complete solution using best practices on Azure AI.
• Support developers, creators, and enterprises to leverage Speech, Vision, Text, Search, Azure Open AI APIs so they can build their own AI products in the future.
• Be a trusted advisor to our top customers, helping them understand and incorporate AI accelerators into their overall cloud strategy by recommending migration paths, integration strategies, and application architecture that incorporate Azure Cognitive services / Azure Open AI.
• Demonstrate how Azure AI is differentiated, highlighting the power of accelerators by working with customers on POCs, demonstrating features, optimizing model performance, profiling, and benchmarking.
• Build repeatable assets to enable other customers and internal teams.
• Influence Azure AI strategy by leveraging Cognitive Services, Search and Azure Open AI models by advocating enterprise customer requirements.
• Address security and IP, performance, scalability, and customer readiness.
• Engages in conversation with customers and collaborates with account and partner teams to drive and qualify new opportunities, understand key technical objections, and resolve technical blockers.
• Identifies customer business and technology readiness, proactively builds external stakeholders’ mapping, implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals, contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities, coaches junior team members in deal plan execution, and implements close plans.

Qualifications:

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• AI Experience: 3+ years of AI (Machine Learning, Intelligent Apps/Agents, Search) selling experience in enterprise public cloud-based solutions. Technical expert on AI/Cognitive Services.
• Solution Sales Experience: 3+ years in customer-facing advisory or pre-sales to demonstrate the ability to distill core technical concepts and connect them to business outcomes. Experience with managing implementation lifecycle for delivery of AI applications. Work experience should involve presales, technical consulting, solution design, project envisioning, planning, development, deployment, and management. Proven customer facing consultative skills.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience and skills with Azure Data and AI services or equivalent compete experience.
• Knowledge of the AI open-source ecosystem.
• Certifications with Azure Data, Azure AI or equivalent industry certifications preferred.
• Strong knowledge of Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search and Azure Open AI (including Speech, Vision, Translation etc.) or equivalent compete experience.
• Knowledge of Prompt Engineering, LLM fine tuning, and chaining technology (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel) expertise.
• Security for Cognitive Services and Azure Open AI.
• Knowledge of large language model (LLM) and Foundational models toolsets.
• Knowledge of application development principles and Cognitive Service API experience.
• Privacy and abuse detection (RAI.)
• Grounding – harnessing the model on your data and the solutioning to achieve that on both structured and unstructured data at scale.
• Experience with implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
• Application design skills to integrate Cognitive Services/API/Azure AI Content Safety into broader solutions.
• Capacity planning and Scalability architecture.
• Scalability design: RPM, concurrency, performance, data security and privacy

Professional Experience:

• Addressing Industry scenarios with technology: Demonstrated effectiveness in landing technology scenarios in industry-relevant ways and credibility to lead and influence niche industry conversations.
• Competitive Landscape: Understanding of Microsoft’s AI technologies relative to major competitors.
• Technical Expertise: Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft, mentors others and develops strategies for best practice sharing, initiates conversations with prospective customers/partners at events, acts as a subject matter expert in one or more solution area(s). Collaborates with partners and internal ecosystems to analyze competitor products, solutions, and/or services and implement strategies.

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. 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 .

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