Technology Specialists – Azure AI Services / Azure Open AI Full-time

As a Technology Specialist specializing in Azure Artificial Intelligence (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 and 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.

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:

• Experience technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND experience in technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• AI Experience: Experience AI (Machine Learning, Intelligent Apps/Agents, Search) selling experience in enterprise public cloud-based solutions. Technical expert on AI/Cognitive Services.
• Solution Sales Experience: Experience 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.
• 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 turning, and chaining technology (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel) expertise.

  Knowledge of large language model (LLM) and Foundational models toolsets

  Experience with implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.

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 .

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