Principal Program Manager - Customer Experience Engineering

We are looking for an experienced and passionate engineering leader to build, lead, and develop a team of M365 Advanced Cloud Engineers (ACE) responsible for delivering proactive and reactive technical support services to Microsoft's most strategic customers. This is a unique opportunity to lead a customer-aligned engineering team focused on building trusted relationships, driving deep engineering engagement, and accelerating the value customers realize from Microsoft 365 services.

We have recently launched an exciting new Mission Critical Services for Microsoft 365 offering, and you will play a pivotal leadership role in shaping its success. You will lead a team responsible for managing critical and complex customer escalations, delivering proactive service insights and early awareness of product changes, and acting as trusted customer advocates. You will establish strong partnerships across Microsoft Product Engineering, ensuring customer feedback and operational insights influence product improvements, service reliability, and future investments.

This role combines people leadership, customer obsession, technical depth, and operational excellence. You will be responsible for developing a high-performing engineering team, establishing consistent and scalable customer engagement practices, driving accountability for customer outcomes, and ensuring effective incident and change-management experiences. You will also work closely with engineering leaders to remove barriers, improve supportability, and deliver measurable improvements in the overall Microsoft 365 customer experience.

With a strong focus on Copilot success, core Microsoft 365 services, and evolving engineering-led support models, you will help define how we deliver world-class technical engagement to our most important customers. As a leader, you will coach and grow engineering talent, foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation, and empower your team to navigate increasingly complex customer environments as organizations transform through AI. As a leader on the team, you will also play the role of sponsor to key customer accounts.

This is an amazing opportunity to join us early in the lifecycle of a new offering, help shape its direction, build a strong engineering team, and influence the future of the Microsoft 365 platform experience at global scale. If you are passionate about developing people, solving complex technical challenges, and delivering exceptional customer experiences through engineering excellence, we would love to have you join our team.

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.

• Develops and provides guidelines to teams to conduct health checks to ensure customer environment (e.g., product, service feature) is optimized and configured for deployment. Ensures teams provide guidance to customers on understanding and implementing new versions, software updates, and releases of platforms and on designing configurations and deploying solutions on Microsoft platforms. Provides opportunities to teams to learn the functions and purposes of new deployment. Prepares teams to answer customer questions related to new release. Ensures teams report customer issues related to new deployment. Develops strategies across the regions to conduct feature reviews and develop guidance for customers on new deployment.
• Develops and executes guidelines for teams to understand which specific customer issues to escalate to appropriate teams to resolve customer issues. Provides strategic guidance to teams to handle escalations on customer issues from the support or field teams. Oversees teams explaining the results of root-cause analysis to the customers of the issues while setting and managing customer expectations. Provides additional support to the team to answer questions from customers. Owns executive (customer & MS internal) incident communication and coordination for the most critical events for strategic accounts. Drive executive engagement when needed to unblock critical customer issues and blockers. Identifies appropriate cross-functional teams to resolve escalated customer issues. Manages teams, customers, and stakeholders with regards to customer escalations.

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.

• Ensures teams partner with other teams (e.g., program managers, software engineers, product, customer service support [CSS] teams) to prioritize and drive customer issues. Provides strategic guidance to teams to collaborate with the internal partner team to deliver solutions back to customers. Develops resolution plans for common types of customer issues. Ensures troubleshooting resources are updated and provided to the Support team. Leads communication and updates across multiple cross-functional teams on strategic customer issues. Establishes escalation channels and escalation management with related stakeholders. Defines and clarifies roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders. Ensures teams across multiple business areas/regions have identified and are working with appropriate stakeholders to drive customer support and engineering. Prioritizes growth and is innovative when creating strategies by developing roadmaps and guiding teams to meet goals.
• Cultivates the image of Microsoft as a valued business partner by aligning the vision for Microsoft's offerings, with strategic customers' overall business objectives, as well as future industry needs, to set a long-term business strategy for customer success. Provides strategic guidance to teams engage with feature and product groups on redesign/customer requested changes for Microsoft.

• Synthesizes and combines broad insights from multiple teams across the department on customer and partner feedback in order to develop strategies for the business, services, and products. Provides strategic guidance to teams to resolve feature and knowledge gaps, misconfigurations, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) in the current product. Becomes a trusted advisor to influence product/engineering teams on development and marketing of new features/tools and automation of solutions across regions. Prioritizes and aligns customer needs with multiple teams at a regional level (e.g., engineering and developer community, sales, account teams) and drives large-scale product improvements at a strategic level across regions. Builds direct relationships with customer leaders as a trusted advisor, focusing on product growth and overall success.
• Develops guidelines for teams to utilize engineering tools, customer telemetry, and/or direct customer input to identify and flag the defects/signals in the product or product misuse, or issues with customers. Proactively monitors issues/incidents reported by customers and ensures they are moving through the system. Verifies that all customers and partners are aligned and informed about the active issues and ensures progress is made on them. Provides expertise and facilitates conversations with strategic customers on discussing and following through on the next steps. Proactively monitors teams to contribute to or investigate and troubleshoot issues using diagnostics. Proactively investigates and troubleshoots increasingly complex issues using diagnostics. Translating business priorities to set strategies and reach organization goals. Drives strategies for teams to identify patterns of issues across customers and drives digital transformation. Shares the Voice of the Customer (VOC) proactively signals to others based on insights from ABC reviews, and executive briefings. Adopts new ways to reduce the time it takes to identify trending issues from customer signals (e.g., AI-based solutions).
• Creates developmental opportunities (e.g., mentorships, shadowing, training) for teams for professional growth and to build their technical intensity/skill needed to resolve customer issues. Develops and runs all-up programs (e.g., training and upskilling) across customer experience across the business. Partners with organizations (e.g., customer experience), C-level leader, CVPs to run the readiness programs. Staying on top of the evolution of trends, overseeing areas of development and identifying areas of improvement within the organization to ensure cutting-edge technology is being accounted for.