Role Description Summary:

Are you interested in playing a critical role in Microsoft Power BI, Azure Analysis Services and Reporting Services new releases? This is an opportunity to work on the modern, comprehensive, enterprise-ready business intelligence platform used to transform data into meaningful insights that spur innovation. If you are excited about being part of the future in cloud services and hybrid platform then this role may be for you.

We are the CSS Data & AI Enterprise Team and our work focuses on improving the overall customer experience with Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies and cloud services. Our work positively affects the adoption and perception of product and service quality, improves our brand image, and contributes to building customer loyalty for a lifetime.

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics service that delivers insights to enable fast, informed decisions. It transforms data into stunning visuals and share them with colleagues on any device. It helps customers to visually explore and analyze data—on-premises and in the cloud—all in one view, enables to collaborate on and share customized dashboards and interactive reports and Scale across your organization with built-in governance and security.

As a Beta Escalation Engineer, you will positively affect the adoption and perception of product and service quality through the development lifecycle, improve our brand image, and contribute to building lifetime customer loyalty. You will be deeply involved with products and services before they are released, understanding key customer scenarios and providing input to ensure customers are successful once released.   Throughout the beta cycle, you will be exposed to information from a variety of feedback channels, aggregating and prioritizing that feedback for the purposes of issue identification and then driving appropriate changes in a product or service and/or driving appropriate actions to mitigate the identified issues.

The successful candidate for this role will have a demonstrated history of working well under the pressure of multiple competing priorities, strong technical and cloud services skills, with a data-driven focus. This role requires a design for operation thinking to automate issue detection and diagnosis, to enable customers or support to self-resolve the issues. This role requires an individual with very strong technology, communication, negotiation, and project management skills who can manage and enable the success of projects without direct authority. As a customer ambassador, you will also partner with engineering leadership for strategic technical, architectural and design discussions, and drive strategic thought leadership. It’s your chance to work directly with our Power BI Product Group to provide world-class engineering support at a product component level.

In this role you will also:

• Stay on top of rapid innovation by testing and documenting new features and technologies as the Community technology previews get released.
• Perform pre-release gap and bug analysis to determine the need for public-facing support content.
• Identify, understand and prioritize service improvement opportunities based upon product feedback.
• Establish listening systems to foster a productive dialog. (Support Delivery, Pre-release customers, GetHelp, Forums, Social Media, MVPs, Field, etc.)
• Provide technical leadership to multiple cross-platform projects and teams. (CSS Support Readiness, CSS Beta Engineers, the Serviceability Team, etc.)
• Partner with product teams and others in Microsoft Services to drive, track, and deliver product improvement and effective mitigations to address problem areas, issues and risks.
• Suggest tool enhancements aimed at streamlining end-user experiences and lower operating costs.
• Create insights and other diagnostic content in Azure Support Center, the global Azure diagnostic platform
• Work closely with engineering teams, readiness managers, release managers and support planners to ensure the needs of our support teams are thoroughly understood.
• Create training and other readiness materials for the internal teams.
• Deliver training to global audiences to ensure support readiness for the launch of new features.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience working with products like Microsoft SQL Server, Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Azure Analysis Services.
• 3+ years of experience in customer support or support role as technical support, systems development, network operations, IT admin or IT consulting.
• Understanding of Tabular models, Familiarity with ETL processing, DAX and M query
• Familiarity with Multidimensional concepts, data modeling and MDX query
• Understanding of Tabular models, Familiarity with ETL processing, DAX and M query
• Having experience in training the team of Tier 1/2/3 level engineers for new features and own the support readiness, creating troubleshooting guides and workflows, defining support boundaries, etc.
• Hands on experience working on complex enterprise scale BI solutions using Microsoft Power BI is plus
• Strong experience and knowledge of Microsoft Business Analysis suits
• Strong communications skills - excellent spoken and written English communication skills and the ability to present complex technical issues clearly and concisely

Preferences:

• Experience in Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse , ETL processing.
• At least 2 years of experience in building reports/dashboards and complex data models using Microsoft Power BI Desktop and Service, refreshing large data models from multiple data sources (cloud and on-prem) , Performance tuning and troubleshooting and support.
• Experience in a Tier 2/3 environment is preferred
• Development or Coding experience with C#, Web API, .Net, Powershell, SQL
• Ability to work collaboratively with the Engineering teams to drive architectural changes to improve stability of
• Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering or equivalent degree

An ideal candidate would also possess the following skills:

• A strong understanding of the Microsoft support delivery business and demonstrated ability to effectively partner with key partner & CSS business owners.
• Experience and confidence in working with senior leaders to achieve common goals.
• Experience in writing diagnostic utilities and scripts

Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position may 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 race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, disability, marital status, pregnancy, protected veteran status, protected genetic information, political affiliation, or any other characteristics protected by local laws, regulations, or ordinances.

Business Justification:

The Power BI engineering team is primarily located in Advanta, WA.  There is one feature team based in ILDC, however the scope of that team only represents approximately 9% of the total support volume and 14% of the team’s headcount.  Power BI support volume will exceed 4000 cases per month in FY20 due to explosive customer growth in the service.  Power BI ships code on weekly trains which will require the beta engineer to participate in shiproom meetings within PST timezone to keep up with the pace of changes in the system.  For these reasons, we request this role be located in Advanta to allow the hire the best opportunity to succeed.