Every minute of every day, customers stake their entire business and reputation on the Microsoft Cloud. The Azure Customer Experience (CXP) team believes that when we meet our high standards for quality and reliability, our customers win. If we falter, our customers fail their end-customers. Our vision is to turn Microsoft Cloud customers into fans. We are customer obsessed problem-solvers. We orchestrate deep engagements in areas like incident management, support and enablement. We analyze and amplify those customer voices, both within our own team, and across the Cloud + AI team, bringing the customer connection to the Quality vision for Azure. We innovate ways to scale what we learn across our customer base. Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are, how we work, and what we enable our customers to achieve. We know that empowering our customers starts with empowering our team to show up authentically, work in ways that are best for them, and achieve their career goals. Would you like to join one of the fastest-growing teams within Microsoft Azure Engineering? Are you constantly customer-obsessed, and focused on enhancing customer experience? Are you passionate about cloud computing and love the challenge of solving the most complex technical problems? Come join us and surround yourself with people who are passionate about cloud computing and believe that extraordinary support is critical to customer success. We are Azure Cloud Engineering – a global Azure Engineering Support organization (part of Azure Customer Experience group) that is customer-obsessed, and support engaged, with an engineering mindset. 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. As the Senior Director - Engineering Operations, you are the Customer Lead for a highly strategic customer, owning the relationship and overseeing the success of our customer promise including support, crisis response and customer reliability engineering. Accountable for the overall delivery of key service level commitments. You will also act as the voice of the customer within Azure to escalate problems and to drive prioritization of platform/support improvement needs for customers. You will work closely and in partnership with key senior stakeholders from Azure Engineering, who has all up responsibility for the integrated service provided by Microsoft, and select partners in run state. **Responsibilities** The role is focused on one of Microsoft’s most complex customers. The Senior Director Engineering Operations will be responsible for the success and outcomes of run state services that support a complex integrated solution provided by Microsoft Product Groups and select partners. The Senior Director Engineering Operations is a seasoned executive who will leverage their strong operations background and link tightly with UK and US teams specifically in Azure CXP and Azure Core. **Operations Leadership** – + Lead strategy and direction and drive excellence in the Operations for our strategic customer engagement + Ensure key SLA targets for support responsiveness, cloud availability, time to mitigate are met. + Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and resolve issues related to cloud infrastructure and services. + Develop and automate operational policies and procedures for the cloud infrastructure of the strategic customer engagements. + Establish crisis management function that ensure world class time to mitigate for service outages and incidents. + Lead the service reliability engineering team, the incident management team, architects and service delivery managers, as they transform our customer from traditional service management to modern operations. + Manage 24x7 support team with on call rotation able to respond to customer most critical incident in 5 min or less. **Customer Relationship Management** – + Develop and maintain strong relationships with the customer key stakeholders. + Leverage your skills such as active listening, problem solving, and being transparent to address difficult customer situations requiring you to set and manage customer expectations while maintaining a trusted customer relationship. + Actively manage external Senior/Executive level relationships up to CEO and CIO level. + Acts as a voice of the customer and leverage the customer's feedback to provide input to our product team. **Lead a customer obsessed delivery team** – + Enable a customer obsessed environment where team members can relentlessly champion and advocate for our customer in representing their issues to engineering teams and be a change agent to develop innovative ways to resolve their issues. + Build on an existing 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. + Work collaboratively with wider Microsoft colleagues to ensure your customer is delighted with their experience. **People Leadership** – + Lead and inspire 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   + 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. + Champion employee engagement, achieving year on year improved in employee satisfaction score including establishing a culture of inclusion in your team. **Technical Oriented** – + Leverage your technical and operations expertise in cloud and high performance computing (HPC) to establish a solid understanding of the customer’s business and ability to earn trust in key customer relationships. + Stay updated with the latest trends and developments in cloud computing, HPC and AI, and lead your **Qualifications** **Required Qualifications** + Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in IT experience in areas including: service management, site reliability engineering, IT support, product/technical program management, or product development + OR equivalent experience. + 5+ years people management experience. + 6+ years experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects. **Preferred Qualifications** + Excellent Communication: Must have the ability to empathize with customers and convey confidence. Able to explain highly technical issues to varied audiences. Able to prioritize and advocate customer’s needs to the proper channels. Take ownership and work towards a resolution. + Customer Obsession: Passion for customers and focus on delivering the right customer experience. + Growth Mindset: Openness and ability to learn new skills and technologies in a fast-paced environment. + IT/Software Technical Support: Experience in a leadership role in technical support for mission critical solutions + Incident Management Experience: Experience in leading incident and crisis management for large mission critical IT Solutions + Site Reliability Engineering: Experience with modern site reliability practices. Built tooling to improve reliability of systems, automated remediation of issues, or improve scalability. + HPC and Cloud Experience: Experience running HPC and Cloud operations with a focus on workflows and schedulers. + Operational Excellence: Experience of driving Operational Excellence in operating large complex mission critical solutions. Significant experience in delivering large scale operational services in a complex change environment, organisational redesign and quality improvement programmes. + Strategic thinking: Ability to see the bigger picture and turn this into an actionable strategy + Bring clarity to ambiguity: In a fast-paced environment, ability to deal with ambiguity effectively and create clarity for the team + Practicality: Ability to balance practical actions with the need to move forward to a broader goal **Other Qualification** The ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: + Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. UK Baseline Personnel Security Standards; UK Security Clearance. \#azcxp #cxpaces Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .