CTO - State - Local - Education - CTJ - Secret

Microsoft

About The Position

Empowering those who serve. At Microsoft, our U.S. Public Sector Industries (USPSI) team is dedicated to supporting mission-critical work across Federal, State and Local Governments and Education (SLED), and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). Whether enabling secure digital classrooms, modernizing public infrastructure, or helping defense contractors transform operations, our work directly impacts national priorities and the lives of millions. If you're passionate about purpose-driven innovation, this is your opportunity to make a difference. Join the U.S. Public Sector Industries (USPSI) Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), a newly formed team focused on shaping how Microsoft delivers secure, mission‑critical technology to government customers. OCTO works at the intersection of field, engineering, cloud, and security to advocate for USPSI engineering needs across products, platforms, and procurement. As a Segment CTO on this team, you will operate with broad scope and influence—driving complex, cross‑company initiatives, translating government mission requirements into actionable engineering priorities, and accelerating customers’ journeys toward becoming frontier organizations through close partnership with Microsoft Specialized Cloud and product engineering teams across the company. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex, cross‑functional environments, enjoys translating mission‑critical public sector needs into actionable technical priorities, and is motivated by delivering meaningful, real‑world impact at scale. 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.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) or other related field AND 10+ years experience working across multiple disciplines/domains (e.g., technology management, consulting, policy and regulations, legal/privacy, or a related field) OR equivalent experience.
6+ years experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role.
Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions.
Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law.
To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government clearance.

Responsibilities

Serve as Microsoft’s designated CTO-level advisor across priority SLED customer engagements, establishing trusted relationships with Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Data Officers, Chief AI Officers, and Chief Information Security Officers.
Lead executive-level architecture strategy discussions aligned to mission modernization initiatives including Zero Trust adoption, platform sovereignty, AI transformation, cyber-resilient data ecosystems, and secure software development lifecycle.
Define secure reference architectures that support complex SLED operational environments including regulated supply-chain collaboration, manufacturing telemetry platforms, engineering data-rights separation, and contractor network segmentation.
Guide customers through architecture decisions affecting identity federation models, cross-tenant collaboration environments, sovereign data boundary controls, and cyber-supply-chain threat mitigation.
Surface field-derived architectural challenges impacting regulated SLED cloud adoption into Microsoft product groups, sovereign cloud platform teams, and Microsoft Security engineering organizations.
Influence platform capability investments by aggregating cross-customer mission requirements affecting identity isolation, operational technology segmentation, advanced threat-protection instrumentation, and cross-cloud observability.
Provide CTO-level technical leadership within complex modernization and platform-migration deals across strategic SLED accounts.
Advise field teams on architecture-driven deal strategy including regulatory workload placement, cyber-risk posture alignment, and sovereign platform eligibility constraints.
Provide strategic technical leadership across USPSI in shaping SLED AI, cloud, and security adoption frameworks.
Mentor senior architecture and program leads on mission-driven technical prioritization and represent USPSI technical strategy within cross-company initiatives and forums across the company.
Identifies highly complex opportunities and gaps in the implementation of multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries including comparison of various quality and performance metrics to various solutions.
May define and lead customer engagements to solicit feedback and understand their experiences with Microsoft’s products and services.
Acts as a subject matter expert in performing highly complex market research in collaboration with other teams, conducting competitive analyses, and examining customer and technology-related industry trends, as well as industry-specific requirements or regulations.
Brings product usage, product telemetry, and service data together to identify highly complex patterns, generate hypotheses, and build a plan to have a impact on the product.
Demonstrates and builds experiences across multiple groups or divisions.
Coaches internal team to develop problem statements and form hypotheses of multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries to address highly complex business, program, and customer needs, and/or market opportunities; identifies all dependencies of other features.
Owns and performs experiments to test hypotheses and inform decisions on what multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) to introduce across divisional boundaries.
Establishes clarity of patterns of root problem and how it relates with previously seen trends across customers; determines the customers/sectors impacted, and uses research evidence to influence feature prioritization.
Determines and leads large process improvements to quickly scope insights.
Leads and drives alignment between the customer, the market, internal stakeholders, senior leadership, and the goals and strategy of Microsoft.
Collaborates with others (e.g., Engineering, Marketing, Design) to ensure that they can satisfy customer requirements.
Evaluates the market size and explores new opportunities to determine for greatest value to the business.
Defines solution options and proposed solution roadmap across multiple feature areas within multiple stages.
Works with Software and Hardware Engineering to design architecture and integrated customer solutions to highly complex technical needs for multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries.
Reviews design documents and architecture proposals, and may provide approvals.
Understands what options are available and leads others to identify and select best option for needs, and creates new solutions if needed.
Works with architects and technical partners to develop future proof architecture.
Works with internal and external technical partners and/or architects to represent technical solutions to customers.
Embody our culture and values