SharePoint Escalation Engineer

For one of the TOP IT Company based out of Bangalore.

Purpose:

To provide responsive and reliable resolution of the most critical and highest impact problems to the strategic corporate customers.  

Responsibilities:

Communicate with corporate customers via telephone, email, or written correspondence regarding technically complex escalated problems as well as managing relationships with those customers.  Frequently, these problems will not only be technically complex, but also politically charged situations requiring the highest level of customer skill

• Receive escalated, technically complex, mission critical or politically hot customer issues, and maintain ownership of issue until resolved completely
• Manage hot issues by setting customer expectations, devising action plans, being available 24x7, and professionally communicating to all parties involved
• Represent professionally in remote or on-site situations
• Use trace analysis, source code, and other sophisticated debugging tools to analyze problems and develop solutions to meet customer needs
• Coordinate with resources from other groups, as needed, to resolve customer issues
• Key technical interface to Sustained Engineering, Product Group, and Development for the resolution of high impact or pervasive issues effecting the corporate clients and take ownership for product improvement in key product areas. This may include source code instrumentation, elaborate reproduction methods, or remote debugging
• Act as technical focal point in cooperative relationships with other companies
• Adds depth to the product feedback from CSS to the Business Unit, through root cause analysis. In addition, works with Product Group on company-wide efforts, such as Best Practice Analyzer, to ensure adequate adoption
• Advise on supportability needs, areas for product improvement, and assists in identifying most critical bugs to be fixed in Service Pack releases
• Act as technical lead, mentor, and role model on a team of engineers; provide direction to others, review solutions and articles, etc.
• Lead triage meetings to share knowledge with other engineers and develop customer solutions efficiently
• Author selective content which will have greater impact on assisting advanced customers to help themselves. This would include white papers, Knowledge Base articles, blogs, and roadmap articles.
• Train other Escalation Engineers and Technical Leads through development and delivery of level 300 and 400 training classes
• Create and deliver comprehensive presentations to the customer managers and executives
• Participate in the interview process for new Escalation Engineers coming into the team and help the Escalation Manager assess levels of performance
• Contribute to the company’s objective of growing market share across solutions, workloads, platforms and products.

Contacts:

• Managers – ranging from front line to executive level (internal and external)
• Engineers -  distributed within Support clusters & other groups (MCS, ADC, PFE, DSE)
• Microsoft developers – across various products
• Program management – across our Development and Sustaining teams
• Partners – external hardware, software and consulting companies
• Corporate customers – enterprise level customers within Professional and Premier

Qualifications Required:

Windows Architecture

• Theoretical understanding of Thread, Process, Processor, Scheduler, Virtual Memory, Heap memory, Shared memory.
• Theoretical understanding of synchronization primitives/objects, device I/O.
• Knowledge of core Win32 Components -  Memory management (Heap, VM etc.,), thread synchronization objects

Networking

• Ability to determine when there is a need for network tracing.
• Ability to use Network Monitor to troubleshoot SMB, TCP, HTTP, RPC
• Familiarity with tools like netstat, tracert, ipconfig.
• Understanding of networking architecture - DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, Firewalls, Proxy server
• Ability to diagnose basic networking problems - port resets, retransmits
• Capable of isolating network problems to an extent [client\server\firewalls].
• Can identify proper location to implement network tracing

Programming

• Knows at least one Object-oriented programming language
• Can review code to verify program logic correctness
• Understand common programming algorithms like searching and sorting
• Can design programs that use documented APIs to solve specific programming problems 
• Must have basic Assembly Language knowledge and be able to explain the general functionality of a sample of disassembly code
• Understanding of Structured Exception Handling, DLLs, Processes, Threads., File I\O

Troubleshooting

• Ability to solve advanced technical problems with semi-sufficient or insufficient information on any product given the source code and symbols that are available.
• Ability to transfer understanding of core Windows and application knowledge to any problem on the platform and resolve it by creating a repro, debugging and in some cases identifying the bug and a potential solution for it
• Must be capable of troubleshooting different classes of issues in core technologies such as Windows, IIS, SQL, ASP.NET - hangs, contention, high CPU, deadlocks, heap corruption, heap fragmentation, etc

Customer Skills

• Onsite customer service experience with an enterprise level customer
• Communicate effectively to multiple stakeholders about the technical aspects of the problem
• Use negotiation skills to resolve differences, find common ground, and create shared ownership of issues
• Makes strategic decisions to resolve most cases, gets cases back on track to successful resolution
• Collaborates effectively with multiple stakeholders 
• Regularly review cases for technical problem solving and customer service issues

Qualifications Recommended:

• A minimum of four years product support experience or the equivalent in work experience (consulting, server administration, account management, etc)
• Knowledge of networking products and/or networking operating systems
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Portal products
• Able to apply CLR internals knowledge and data  to find the root cause of the problem
• Familiarity with VS Tools such as gacutil, ILDASM,fusion log, ngen, sn.exe, regasm etc
• Understand and explain Garbage Collection, Finalization, managed threads, ThreadPool
• Ability to analyze a dump file to find the source or managed heap consumption\leaks, Hangs, examine objects, troubleshoot specific managed exceptions
• Can manage complex and politically volatile situations and take a strong role in them
• Can leads team case review meetings
• Review other engineer's written replies for approach and technical accuracy
• Can host conference calls with multiple participants, each having different roles or background
• General understanding of Active Directory architecture, features and tools
• Understanding of windows security basics such as file and share permissions, AD groups, authentication, authorization, etc