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The Principal Azure Customer Engineer (ACE) Manager is accountable for end‑to‑end engineering support delivery (AED – Azure Engineering Direct) for an assigned portfolio of Microsoft’s strategic customers, demonstrating strong partnership with internal and external stakeholders. This role serves as the primary leadership point of accountability and escalation and includes direct people leadership responsibility for Azure Customer Engineers. This is a unique role following the “Player‑Coach” leadership model, with 50% focused on direct customer engagement on complex support issues and 50% on managing and coaching a team of Azure Customer Engineers supporting Microsoft’s top Azure customers. Success requires strong operational, leadership, and technical capability. You will work with industry‑leading companies and collaborate directly with Azure engineering teams to deliver solutions and new capabilities, leading a team of highly skilled engineers supporting mission‑critical Azure deployments.
Job Responsibility:
Lead a high‑performing team that supports top Azure customers and resolves critical, complex technical issues in a 24x7x365 environment
Hire, onboard, develop, coach, mentor, and evaluate Azure Customer Engineers
Build a team culture rooted in customer obsession
Build a framework where the team works closely with Azure engineering on complex issues and invests in engineering practices
Collaborate with Azure engineering teams using a prioritized set of opportunities to eliminate top issues impacting customer experience
Create standards and best practices that simplify and optimize support capabilities
Foster a culture of innovation by leveraging AI, encouraging automation, tooling enhancement
Lead operational excellence by reinforcing ACE accountability for complex cases
Attract and build a diverse, high‑performing team
Create an inclusive environment where every employee feels empowered and engaged
Establish and execute a readiness framework ensuring Azure Customer Engineers stay current with rapidly evolving technologies
Oversee increasingly complex customer issues and incidents
Recommend solutions to close skill gaps and meet readiness needs
Track evolving industry and technology trends and identify opportunities to improve team capability and product quality
Collaborate effectively with partners to synthesize feedback from challenging and strategic customers
Facilitate discussions with engineering and product stakeholders on product strategy and roadmaps
Lead your team in sharing insights and best practices with customers and partners
Requirements:
Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Analytics/Science, Artificial Intelligence, or related field, AND at least 12 years of experience in the technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering
OR equivalent experience
5+ years of experience managing and leading highly technical, customer‑facing teams in a fast‑paced environment
Hands‑on experience with cloud technologies
Azure experience preferred
Strong communication skills and executive presence, with the ability to engage confidently with CxO and BDM audiences
Exceptional interpersonal, verbal, written, and presentation skills required
Nice to have:
Knowledge of modern engineering practices such as Agile, Lean, DevOps, etc. and modern cloud competencies (distributed systems, observability, compute/storage/network, containerization, identity, etc.)
Strong passion and focus on delivering the right customer experience and value
Demonstrated ability to build a deep relationship with internal teams and customers
Proven ability to recruit and develop global teams that are diverse and inclusive
Ability to debug complex distributed system issues and guide engineers toward root cause using logs/traces/diagnostics
Ability to innovate and drive change for growth, value and efficiency