Overview
Are you interested in working for one of the most exciting teams in Microsoft, relentlessly focused on customer needs and advancing Microsoft's cloud first strategy? Interested in a start-up like environment, passionate about cloud computing technology constantly evolving itself and driving growth in one of Microsoft's core businesses? Then the Azure Customer Experience engineering team, within the Engineering Operations (EngOps) organisation is for you!
The Principal Azure Customer Engineer (ACE) Manager is accountable for end‑to‑end engineering support delivery (AED – Azure Engineering Direct) for an assigned portfolio of Microsoft’s strategic customers, demonstrating strong partnership with internal and external stakeholders. This role serves as the primary leadership point of accountability and escalation and includes direct people leadership responsibility for Azure Customer Engineers.
This is a unique role following the “Player‑Coach” leadership model, with 50% focused on direct customer engagement on complex support issues and 50% on managing and coaching a team of Azure Customer Engineers supporting Microsoft’s top Azure customers. Success requires strong operational, leadership, and technical capability. You will work with industry‑leading companies and collaborate directly with Azure engineering teams to deliver solutions and new capabilities, leading a team of highly skilled engineers supporting mission‑critical Azure deployments.
Responsibilities
Lead a Customer Obsessed Engineering Team:
- Lead a high‑performing team that supports top Azure customers and resolves critical, complex technical issues in a 24x7x365 environment.
- Hire, onboard, develop, coach, mentor, and evaluate Azure Customer Engineers. Set a high bar for excellence and build a diverse and inclusive high‑performing team.
- Enable a customer‑obsessed environment where engineers advocate relentlessly for customers, represent customer issues to engineering teams, and drive innovative ways to resolve challenges.
- Build a team culture rooted in customer obsession, where engineers go beyond the immediate issue to delight customers and anticipate and resolve problems before they are reported.
Continual Engineering Improvement:
- Build a framework where the team not only works closely with Azure engineering on complex issues but also invests in engineering practices such as daily scrums and triage to deeply understand platform gaps from customer insights and incident signals.
- Collaborate with Azure engineering teams using a prioritized set of opportunities to eliminate top issues impacting customer experience and improve Azure quality and security - driving platform fixes, ensuring engineering‑quality investigations and diagnostics, delivering high‑fidelity RCAs, and owning data‑driven insights from support signals.
- Create standards and best practices that simplify and optimize support capabilities, and drive adoption across Azure service teams and broader support delivery organizations.
- Foster a culture of innovation by leveraging AI, encouraging automation, tooling enhancement, and deeper integration with Engineering Systems to continuously improve diagnostics and supportability.
- Lead operational excellence by reinforcing ACE accountability for complex cases, improving Time to Mitigate (TTM), and maturing the ACE Incident-Management function to ensure high‑quality, engineering‑driven problem resolution.
People Leadership:
- Attract and build a diverse, high‑performing team with the capabilities needed to meet current and future business objectives. Balance developing existing employees with hiring new internal and external talent.
- Create an inclusive environment where every employee feels empowered and engaged. Provide ongoing feedback that supports performance improvement and fosters a positive, morale‑boosting culture.
- Foster seamless cross‑geo engineering collaboration to ensure uninterrupted 24x7 support and shared ownership.
- Establish and execute a readiness framework ensuring Azure Customer Engineers stay current with rapidly evolving technologies and drive systematic upskilling of the team’s technical depth and breadth, including the development of ACE Technical Subject Matter Expertise.
- Leverage resources to help employees develop skills and support their career interests.
- Remove barriers to agility to enable the team to shift priorities quickly without losing productivity.
Technical-Oriented:
- Oversee increasingly complex customer issues and incidents, ensuring they are expedited and investigated using engineering‑quality diagnostics.
- Recommend solutions to close skill gaps and meet readiness needs. Act as a thought leader and mentor by sharing knowledge and contributing to external content and readiness strategies for customers and partners.
- Track evolving industry and technology trends and identify opportunities to improve team capability and product quality.
- Collaborate effectively with partners to synthesize feedback from challenging and strategic customers, identifying and proactively resolving product gaps, misconfigurations, and KPI‑impacting issues.
- Facilitate discussions with engineering and product stakeholders on product strategy and roadmaps, interpreting customer scenarios and driving resolution of issues and concerns. Provide recommendations for large‑scale automation and new features or tools to improve product reliability and scale.
- Lead your team in sharing insights and best practices with customers and partners across multiple forums and collaborate with teams to recommend improvements to troubleshooting guides, content, and performance metrics.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Analytics/Science, Artificial Intelligence, or related field, AND at least 12 years of experience in the technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering; OR equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of experience managing and leading highly technical, customer‑facing teams in a fast‑paced environment.
- Hands‑on experience with cloud technologies; Azure experience preferred.
- Strong communication skills and executive presence, with the ability to engage confidently with CxO and BDM audiences. Exceptional interpersonal, verbal, written, and presentation skills required.
**Preferred Qualifications: **
- Knowledge of modern engineering practices such as Agile, Lean, DevOps, etc. and modern cloud competencies (distributed systems, observability, compute/storage/network, containerization, identity, etc.)
- Strong passion and focus on delivering the right customer experience and value. Demonstrated ability to build a deep relationship with internal teams and customers.
- Proven ability to recruit and develop global teams that are diverse and inclusive
- Ability to debug complex distributed system issues and guide engineers toward root cause using logs/traces/diagnostics”)
- Ability to innovate and drive change for growth, value and efficiency
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about **requesting accommodations.**