Principal Customer Experience Engineering Manager

Job Description

Overview

Microsoft is driven by a mission to empower every person and every organization to achieve more, with Azure at the center of this vision. We are seeking a customer‑obsessed Principal Customer Experience Engineer Manager to support one of Azure’s most strategic and high‑visibility UK government accounts within a high‑performance computing environment. As part of the Azure Customer Experience (CXP) organization, this role leads a small operations team and requires exceptional leadership, communication, and relationship‑management skills to strengthen operational practices and collaborate across resolver groups, customers, program managers, and suppliers.

This position is responsible for enhancing environment stability, improving telemetry and alerting, and guiding teams in leveraging engineering tools and customer insights to identify defects, product misuse, and systemic issues. It also involves overseeing proactive health checks to ensure environments are optimized and deployment‑ready, as well as defining escalation paths to ensure customer issues are efficiently routed and resolved. A key part of the role is cultivating Microsoft’s position as a trusted strategic partner by aligning our offerings with customer goals, long‑term strategy, and future industry needs.

As a people manager, the role includes supporting employee development, driving project execution, and managing team performance while embodying a culture of inclusiveness, growth‑mindset, and engineering excellence. This UK‑based role requires regular travel between Microsoft’s Reading office and the customer site in the South West of England, with several days each week spent onsite.

Responsibilities
Job Responsibilities

• Customer Solution Lifecycle Management -- Develops and provides guidelines to conduct health checks to ensure customer environment is optimised and configured for deployment. Ensures teams provide guidance to customers on understanding and implementing new versions, software updates, and releases of platforms. Prepares teams to answer customer questions related to new releases. Ensures teams report customer issues related to new deployment.
• 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. Drive executive engagement when needed to unblock customer issues and blockers. Identifies appropriate cross-functional teams to resolve escalated customer issues. Manages teams, customers, and stakeholders with regards to customer escalations.
• People Management -- Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modelling, 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.
• Relationship/Experience Management -- Ensures teams partner with other teams (e.g., program managers, software engineers, product, support teams) to prioritise 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.
• Technical-Oriented -- develops guidelines for teams to use engineering tools, telemetry, and customer input to identify and flag defects/signals in the product or product misuse, or issues with customers. Proactively monitors customer reported issues/incidents and manage them to resolution. Verifies that all customers and partners are aligned. Provides expertise and facilitates conversations with strategic customers on discussing and following through on the next steps. Shares the Voice of the Customer (VOC) proactively into executive briefings.
• Synthesizes and combines insights from multiple teams on customer and partner feedback 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). Builds direct relationships with customer leaders as a trusted advisor, focusing on product growth and overall success.
• 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. Partners with c-suite, CVPs to run the readiness programs.

Qualifications
Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Data Analytics/Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or related field AND proven years experience in technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering OR equivalent experience.
• Proven years of customer facing experience.
• Proven years of people management experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Engineering, or related field AND proven years experience in technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Data Analytics/Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or related field AND proven years experience in technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering OR equivalent experience.
• Proven years of customer facing experience.
• Proven years people management experience.

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This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.