Support Engineer - Azure SQL

Are you an experienced Support Engineer - Azure SQL with a desire to excel? If so, then Talent Software Services may have the job for you! Our client is seeking an experienced Support Engineer - Azure SQL to work in Redmond, WA.

Position Summary: We are building an engineering team within support to be "the differentiator in the marketplace and need the best and brightest to take our SQL Cloud solutions to the next level.

Primary Responsibilities/Accountabilities:

• As a Support Escalation Engineer, you will be an important member of the Azure SQL DB support delivery team.
• Participate in on call coverage rotation (approx. 15% of the time)
• Lead engineering investigations to bring quicker issue resolution to support incidents impacting our customers and improve customer experience.
• Build solutions, help create tools, help automate issue detection and diagnosis, to enable customers or support to self-resolve the issues.
• Identify emerging trends or re-occurring escalation scenarios and drive engineering opportunities to mitigate and/or eliminate them from the workflow. This can include a range of potential work item categories, such as self-healing mechanisms, self-serve, transparency, automation, and/or increasing the capabilities for Azure support.
• Contribute to product improvements by filing impactful bugs, and design change requests and helping developers to fix and ship them to production, preventing customers from being impacted.
• Receive escalated, technically complex mission critical or politically hot customer issues, and maintain ownership of the issue until resolved completely.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of products and report software bugs and customer product enhancements to the Product Group
• The successful candidate will have a solid understanding of the competitive landscape and use this understanding to influence decision-makers in both support and the Azure SQL DB engineering groups.
• Work directly with our Azure SQL DB Product Group to provide world-class engineering support at a product component level.
• Perform complex product debugging and remediation when needed; working alongside the Azure SQL DB development teams to drive support incident resolution for configuration, code, or other service deficiencies impacting customers.
• Identify emerging trends or recurring escalation scenarios and drive engineering opportunities to mitigate and/or eliminate them from the workflow.
• This can include a range of potential work item categories; such as self-healing mechanisms, transparency, automation, and/or increasing the capabilities of Azure SQL DB.

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of Mandatory experience in SQL Server Products as a SQL Server Engine Administrator
• 2+ years of experience in one or more of the following: Azure, Cloud Computing
• 2+ years of experience with various versions of SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio
• 2+ years of experience with SQL Query optimizations including queries, joins, aggregations
• 2 + years of Database Administration: c creation, configuration, backup, restoration security, permissions, and access control
• Skill in setting up and configuring SQL Server instances, including installation, patching, and upgrades.
• Proficiency in managing databases, including schema design, table creation, and data modification.
• Knowledge of backup and recovery strategies, including regular backups, full and differential backups, and point-in-time restores.
• Competence in managing database security, roles, permissions, and auditing
• Troubleshooting Skills:
• Ability to diagnose and troubleshoot complex database issues, including but not limited to performance problems, connectivity issues, and data corruption.

Scripting and Automation:

• Ability to create and maintain scripts for automating routine database tasks, such as backups, maintenance, and monitoring.
• Proficiency in scripting languages like PowerShell, Python, or Bash for task automation.
• Experience in scheduling and managing automated tasks using tools like SQL Server Agent or external schedulers.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery:

• Hands-on experience with SQL Server high availability features like AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Failover Clustering, and database mirroring.
• Ability to configure and manage high availability solutions for fault tolerance and business continuity.
• Knowledge of disaster recovery planning, including backup strategies and off-site data replication.

SQL Server Internals:

• In-depth knowledge of SQL Server architecture, including memory management, query processing, and storage engine.
• Understanding of how data is stored on disk, including filegroups, data files, and log files.
• Familiarity with the system catalog views and system dynamic management views (DMVs) for monitoring and troubleshooting

Performance Tuning:

• Proficiency in diagnosing and resolving performance issues by optimizing hardware resources, memory, and disk I/O.
• Ability to fine-tune SQL Server settings, including memory allocation, parallelism, and query concurrency.
• Skill in using performance monitoring tools like SQL Server Profiler, Extended Events, and Performance Monitor.

Debugging and Profiling Tools:

• Familiarity with SQL Server debugging and profiling tools, including SQL Server Profiler, Extended Events, and Dynamic Management Functions (DMFs).
• Capability to capture and analyze query execution plans and runtime statistics to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Proficiency in troubleshooting and resolving database issues using these tools.

Operating Systems:

• Knowledge of Windows Server operating systems, as SQL Server often runs on Windows servers.
• Knowledge of Client SQL Server at dev level (SQL language, Stored Procedures, etc.)
• Competency with Windows, networking, Active Directory, Clustering or virtualization
• Experience managing applications and services through PowerShell, Bash or similar scripting languages.

Familiarity with development: tools, language, process, methods, troubleshooting

• Experience with JSON, Markdown Language, Azure DevOps is a plus
• Development/Coding (Optional)
• Experience with C#, JAVA, .NET, PowerShell, CLI, Client Azure SQL is a preferred
• Service engineering and/or DevOps experience at internet scale involving user data and/or software development for an enterprise level product