Senior Customer Experience Engineering Manager

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 environment, passionate about cloud computing technology and driving growth in one of Microsoft's core businesses? Then the Azure Customer Experience (CXP) Team is for you! 

The Senior Azure Customer Engineer (ACE) Manager is accountable for end-to-end engineering support delivery for an assigned portfolio of Microsoft strategic customers, demonstrating a critical partnership with internal and external stakeholders.   This role serves as the primary leadership point of accountability and/or escalation for their portfolio of customers and has direct people management responsibility for Azure Customer Engineers. The ACE Manager is responsible for driving customer satisfaction. 

We are fundamentally changing how we deliver world-class support to our top Azure customers and building a new global support and operations team to do it. We are looking for a customer-obsessed Support Lead to help us launch and grow a new team focused on delivering an extraordinary experience reinventing customer support. This is a unique role in the Azure CXP team following the 'Player-Coach' leadership principal with 50% customer engagement on complex support issues, and 50% managing and coaching a team of Azure Cloud Engineers in supporting our top Azure customers. This role requires strong operational, leadership, and technical skills to manage a team of engineers responsible for providing world class support to our customers. You will work with industry leading companies and directly partner with engineering teams within Azure to deliver solutions and new capabilities, leading a team of highly skilled engineers delivering support for our customers’ most mission critical Azure deployments.  

Hire, on-board, develop, coach, mentor and evaluate Azure Customer Engineers. Set a clear bar for excellence. Build a high performing team that will be diverse and inclusive. 

Must possess exceptional cross-team collaboration and communication skills. 

Coach and enable your team to deliver world class support with an engineering mindset to strategic S500 customers. 

Drive operational excellence, including ACE direct case ownership, improved Time to Mitigate (TTM) and ACE Problem Resolution Owner function. 

Up level ACE role to focus on customer success and business impact 

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

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.

Basic Qualifications: 

5+ years of experience delivering solutions and support to enterprise customers 

3+ years of experience managing and leading highly technical teams in a fast-paced environment 

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field 

1+ years experience with cloud computing technologies; Azure Cloud preferred 

Strong communication skills with executive presence, including the ability to hold CxO and BDM level discussions, exceptional interpersonal, verbal, written and presentation skills required 

Preferred Qualifications:  

Knowledge of modern engineering practices such as Agile, Lean, etc. 

Strong passion and focus on delivering the right customer experience 

Demonstrated ability to recruit and develop global teams 

Ability to innovate and drive change 

Ability to build a deep relationship with internal teams and customers 

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will 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 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.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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.

Lead a Customer Obsessed Support Delivery Team: 

• Lead a high-performing team that will directly support our top Azure customers and resolve critical and complex technical issues in a 24x7x365 environment. Align team efforts to deliver world-class support to meet our customer's requirements. 
• Enable a customer obsessed environment where team members can relentlessly champion and advocate for our customers in representing their issues to engineering teams and be a change agent to develop innovative ways to resolve their issues. 
  
  
• Build a team culture that thrives on customer obsession, where team members go above and beyond their immediate issue at hand to delight the customer and can predict and resolve the next issue before the customer reports it. 

Continual Engineering Improvement:

• Build a framework where the team not only works closely with Azure engineering teams to support customers with their complex issues but invests in engineering practices such as daily scrum and triage meetings to deeply understand platform gaps based on feedback from customers, and insights gained while supporting them. And then collaborate with engineering teams across Azure based on a prioritize list of product improvement opportunities to eliminate top issues impacting customer experience. 
  
  
• Create standards and best practices that simplify and optimize support capabilities, and drive adoption across multiple service teams across Azure, as well as to our broader Azure support delivery teams. 
  
  
• Create an environment that fosters innovative approaches to automating customer solutions. Establish tight integration with Cloud Engineering System to continually improve the Azure support tooling and diagnostics capabilities. 

Support Readiness: 

• Foster an environment where support engineers are onboarded with the right balance of technical depth and breadth, so they can support a broad range of complex scenarios. 
  
  
• Establish a readiness framework where support engineers are abreast of latest technologies in a constantly changing environment. 

People Leadership: 

• Attract and build a diverse, high-performing team with capabilities needed to achieve current and future business objectives. Balance the development of existing employees while bringing in new external and internal talent. Identify and develop technical and soft skills needed to deliver outstanding support and solutions to our customers. 
  
  
• Create an inclusive work environment where every employee can effectively engage and wants to be part of the team. Provide ongoing feedback that helps direct reports improve their performance. Promote a positive environment across the organization by modeling behavior that promotes good morale. 
  
  
• Drive up-leveling of team’s technical skills   
  
  
• Build and develop ACE Technical Subject Matter Expertise to effectively address complex problems 
  
  
• 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.