Director, Strategic Customer Engagement & Enterprise Initiatives

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Director, Strategic Customer Engagement & Enterprise Initiatives is a senior individual contributor role within the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization, reporting to the Strategy & Operations Leader for CSS.

This role operates as a trusted extension of the CSS LT, leading across two critical dimensions:
•    Customer Impact: Owning the most complex, high-visibility customer engagements and escalations on behalf of the CVP, ensuring coordinated, high-quality resolution and long-term relationship strength.
•    Enterprise Initiatives: Identifying, incubating, and driving high-impact, often confidential strategic projects that fall outside existing ownership models, shaping how CSS evolves its operating model, customer experience, and internal effectiveness.

This role is designed for a senior leader who thrives in ambiguity, operates with high trust and discretion, and can move seamlessly between executive engagement, cross-functional mobilization, and hands-on problem solving to deliver measurable 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

Customer Engagement & Escalation Leadership
•    Manage the most complex, high-priority customer engagements and relationship-level escalations directed to the CSS CVP, driving coordinated resolution across field, engineering, and support teams. 
•    Serve as a senior designee for the CVP across strategic customer accounts, ensuring consistent executive engagement, clear communication, and strong follow-through. 
•    Lead end-to-end preparation and execution for executive customer engagements, including travel, briefings, stakeholder alignment, and post-engagement actions. 
•    Drive continual improvement in escalation management, triage, and engagement models to increase speed, clarity, and customer impact. 

Enterprise Opportunity Identification
•    Proactively identify systemic gaps, high-leverage opportunities, and cross-functional friction points impacting customer experience, operational efficiency, or organizational effectiveness.
•    Gather signals from customer interactions, leadership insights, data trends, and frontline feedback to surface unowned or underdeveloped opportunities.
•    Frame opportunities in terms of enterprise value and long-term impact rather than local optimization.

Strategic Initiative Incubation & Execution
•    Design and lead rapid experiments, pilots, and proofs of concept across people, process, operating model, or customer experience domains.
•    Build and test “minimum viable solutions” to validate hypotheses and accelerate learning.
•    Operate with agility outside standard governance where appropriate, while maintaining strong judgment, risk awareness, and leadership alignment.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Influence
•    Mobilize and lead small, high-impact, cross-disciplinary teams without direct authority to drive outcomes in ambiguous or high-stakes environments.
•    Broker alignment across Engineering, Sales, Finance, HR, and Operations to unblock progress and enable execution.
•    Act as connective tissue across organizational boundaries, resolving issues before formal escalation is required.

Executive Advisory & Decision Support
•    Prepare CVP and senior leaders with clear decision frameworks, trade-offs, and actionable insights—focusing on clarity and velocity over volume.
•    Pressure-test strategic initiatives and customer approaches prior to broader rollout.
•    Provide candid, data-driven counsel in sensitive or ambiguous situations, balancing transparency with discretion.

Scale, Transition, or Sunset Initiatives
•    When initiatives demonstrate impact, transition them into appropriate owning teams with clear success metrics, governance, and artifacts.
•    When initiatives do not meet objectives, close them decisively and capture learnings

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

·       Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o   OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 8+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o   OR 11+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

·       Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 10+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o   OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, operations, engineering or related field AND 13+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o   OR 16+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o   OR equivalent experience.

·       Project management experience.

·       Experience working with Microsoft products and services.

·       Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals).

·       10+ years of experience in customer engagement, program leadership, or enterprise roles

·       Proven experience managing complex customer relationships and high-severity escalations 

·       Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives in ambiguous, fast-paced environments 

·       Enterprise Thinking: Sees patterns, dependencies, and second-order impacts across systems

·       Judgment & Discretion: Operates with high trust in sensitive and confidential environments

·       Bias for Action: Moves quickly with imperfect information, prioritizing learning and outcomes

·       Influence Without Authority: Drives alignment and execution across boundaries

·       Clarity & Narrative: Translates complexity into actionable, decision-ready insights

Support Escalation Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $277,200 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 $165,600 - $303,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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

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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.