Principal Azure Customer Engineer (ACE) Manager

Job ID: 200044674Posted: 2026-07-24Location: United States, Georgia, AtlantaSalary: USD $142,800 - $274,800 per yearEmployment type: Full-TimeWork site: 3 days / week in-officeRole type: People ManagerTravel: Less than 25%Profession: Program ManagementDiscipline: Customer Experience EngineeringCompany: MicrosoftOverviewAre 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 Engineering Operations (EngOps) Team is for you!The Prinipal Azure Customer Engineer (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. The Principal Azure Customer Engineer (ACE) Manager is responsible for driving customer satisfaction.    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 Manager 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 EngOps team following the 'Player-Coach' leadership principle 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 highly 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 high performing team that will be diverse and inclusive.  • Possess exceptional 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.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.ResponsibilitiesLead a Customer Obsessed Support Delivery Team:  • Lead a high-performing 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. • 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.     Support Readiness:  • Foster an environment where support engineers are onboarded with the right balance of technical depth and breadth, so they can support a broad range of complex scenarios.  • Establish a readiness framework where support engineers are abreast of the latest technologies in a constantly changing environment.     People Leadership:  • Attract and build a diverse, high-performing team with capabilities needed to achieve current and future business objectives. Balance the development of existing employees while bringing in new external and internal talent. Identify and develop technical and soft skills needed to deliver outstanding support and solutions to our customers.  • Create an inclusive work environment where every employee can effectively engage and wants to be part of the team. Provide ongoing feedback that helps direct reports improve their performance. Promote a positive environment across the organization by modeling behavior that promotes good morale.  • Drive up-leveling of team’s technical skills    • Build and develop ACE Technical Subject Matter Expertise to effectively address complex problems  • Leverage resources to help employees develop skills and support their career interests.  • Remove barriers to agility to enable the team to shift priorities quickly without losing productivity.QualificationsRequired/minimum qualificationsBachelor's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Data Analytics/Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or related field AND 6+ years experience in technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering OR equivalent experience.1+ year(s) of customer facing experience.Additional or preferred qualificationsMaster's Degree in Engineering, or related field AND 8+ 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 12+ years experience in technology industry, cloud, technical support, and/or customer experience engineering OR equivalent experience.3+ years of customer facing experience.5+ years people management experience.Customer Experience Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: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.