Principal Azure Customer Engineering (ACE) 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 Principal Azure Customer Engineering (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.

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 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 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 team that will be diverse and inclusive. 
• Possess 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 

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. 

Responsibilities

Lead a Customer Obsessed Support Delivery Team:  

• Lead a 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.