Senior Director, Engineering Leader

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

18h

About The Position

Microsoft’s Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP) builds and continually reinvents the technology behind Microsoft’s Customer Service & Support (CSS) and Customer Success Unit (CSU) businesses. ITP is part of the Office of the CTO (OCTO) within MCAPS-Core and works with product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners to accelerate customer outcomes and business growth. Engineering delivers the technology behind customer support and success across Innovation, Production, and a shared Tech Ops function.

The Senior Director of Engineering leads the engineering platforms behind CSS and CSU and owns end-to-end engineering strategy, organizational health, customer experience, and business outcomes. The role leads a multidisciplinary, globally distributed engineering organization; defines multi-year technical strategy; directs major engineering and workforce investments; and delivers secure, reliable, responsible experiences at global scale. It makes AI transformation central to engineering practices and drives AI adoption across engineering, ITP, and the businesses served.

This leader is an experienced people manager and leader of leaders with executive-level organizational leadership and credible technical depth. The role remains involved in consequential architecture, design, modernization, reliability, security, and live-site decisions while delivering through managers and senior technical leaders. It creates clarity across organizational boundaries and partners broadly across Microsoft to deliver end-to-end customer and business impact.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
• 4+ years of people management experience, including leading engineering managers and delivering results through multiple teams.
• Demonstrated experience as a leader of leaders, including setting expectations for senior managers, developing leadership capability, managing performance, and maintaining succession plans for business-critical roles.
• Experience defining and executing product and technical strategy for a complex, business-critical portfolio.
• Demonstrated success delivering secure, reliable, high-quality products or services at significant scale.
• Experience leading engineering teams in AI-first development practices, such as AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, and AI-driven testing, code review, and operations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead organizational AI transformation while maintaining delivery commitments and service health.
• Experience making engineering investment decisions, managing organizational and technical risk, and operating effectively in ambiguous environments.
• Demonstrated ability to embrace change, push boundaries, and continually improve how teams work and operate.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders and align stakeholders across organizational and functional boundaries.
• Executive-level written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience leading a globally distributed engineering organization and developing senior engineering leaders.
• Experience managing a portfolio spanning multiple products, platforms, services, or technical disciplines.
• Prior engineering leader or equivalent experience with direct accountability for a significant engineering portfolio, organizational operating model, investment decisions, and measurable customer or business outcomes.
• Experience applying AI and automation to improve customer experiences, engineering productivity, and operational performance.
• Business judgment, including experience with portfolio planning, workforce planning, budgeting, and prioritization.
• Track record of building inclusive, accountable, and high-performing organizations.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a Bachelor's degree in the field and 12+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Familiarity with the Microsoft engineering toolchain and services, such as Azure, GitHub and GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.
• Experience partnering directly with enterprise customers, strategic partners, regulators, or external industry leaders.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate the engineering vision, aligning technical and AI investments with customer needs, market opportunities, and Microsoft's broader strategy.
• Drive AI adoption and transformation within engineering and across ITP, CSS, CSU, and MCAPS, modeling AI-first practices and scaling AI tools, agents, and working methods.
• Own a defined portfolio and establish measurable objectives for customer value, business performance, service health, engineering effectiveness, and organizational capability.
• Allocate Innovation (“spike”) and production engineering squads, plus shared Tech Ops, across ITP priorities according to the engineering capacity each stage of work requires.
• Lead, coach, and grow engineering managers, architects, and engineers, establishing accountability while empowering leaders to make decisions.
• Translate long-term business and technical strategies into roadmaps, milestones, resource plans, and measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Guide architecture and engineering investments.
• Partner with OCTO and ITP Partner Architects to uphold acceptance standards for partner-built engineering and AI systems and maintain a coherent engineering portfolio.
• Engage directly in critical architecture and design reviews, major technical tradeoffs, security and privacy decisions, and responses to consequential live-site incidents.
• Drive engineering excellence across design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, incident response, and service operations.
• Champion security, privacy, accessibility, responsible AI, compliance, reliability, performance, and quality throughout the product lifecycle.
• Build partnerships with customers and partners and incorporate their needs and feedback into product strategy and engineering priorities.
• Make portfolio and investment decisions, manage technical and operational risks, and balance near-term delivery with long-term platform health and innovation.
• Resolve complex dependencies across organizational boundaries and deliver integrated experiences reflecting a One Microsoft approach.
• Communicate strategy, progress, risks, and decisions to senior executives, customers, partners, and the broader organization.
• Attract, retain, and develop diverse leadership and engineering talent; strengthen succession plans and organizational capability.
• Own workforce strategy, leadership succession, organizational design, capacity planning, and budget or investment allocation for the engineering portfolio.
• Foster an inclusive culture grounded in customer obsession, growth mindset, accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Model Microsoft's leadership principles by creating clarity, generating energy, and delivering success.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the Microsoft careers pay information page.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior