Job Description

Overview

Mission Critical Services for Microsoft Security Cloud (MCSfMSC) helps enterprise customers maximize the reliability, resilience, and business value of their Microsoft security investments. The team provides proactive technical guidance and coordinated support across Microsoft’s security cloud portfolio (Defender, Entra, Intune, Purview, Security Copilot, Sentinel), while also serving as a critical escalation partner during high-impact incidents and service disruptions. It helps customers strengthen their security posture, prepare for operational risks, accelerate adoption, and restore stability quickly when urgent issues arise—bringing together the right engineering expertise, coordination, and communication across the customer, support, product, and development teams.

A successful Customer Lead Engineer combines deep technical credibility in cloud security with exceptional customer leadership and orchestration skills. They translate complex technical conditions into clear business impact, coordinate the right Microsoft teams to investigate and resolve customer issues, and maintain confidence with senior stakeholders throughout both proactive engagements and critical situations. The strongest people are accountable, calm under pressure, and curious: they identify risks before they become incidents, drive durable solutions rather than temporary fixes, and advocate effectively for both the customer and Microsoft while maintaining a high bar for communication, operational excellence, and trust.

Responsibilities

Strategic Technical Leadership: Serve as the Customer Lead Engineer (CLE) for assigned strategic customers, acting as the primary engineering advocate and technical lead for the MCSfMSC engagement. Develop a deep understanding of each customer's security architecture, business goals, and operational environment, and represent the engagement with stakeholders up to and including the CISO level. - Technical Escalation Management: Directly engage and swiftly respond to technical escalations from Microsoft's mission-critical security customers as part of a globally distributed engineering team providing follow-the-sun coverage. - Accelerated Incident Resolution: With minimal guidance, lead the coordinated response to high-severity product and service incidents and major escalations, serving as Incident Manager both for your assigned customers and through participation in a rotational incident management function. Drive mitigation, engineering engagement, stakeholder alignment, executive communications, and timely root-cause analysis while maintaining clear accountability boundaries with product engineering and support teams. - Customer Advocacy: Represent the voice of the customer within Microsoft Security Engineering, influencing product roadmaps, engineering priorities, and support strategies through customer insights and escalation trends. - Collaboration: Partner with customers, account teams, product managers, core engineering, and support engineers to understand customer architecture, troubleshoot complex product issues, and align stakeholders across Microsoft on shared customer priorities. - Proactive Engagement: Own and drive customer Service Improvement Plans, health reviews, and outcome-based improvement tracking. Analyze customer telemetry, product-health signals, support trends, and escalation patterns to identify systemic risks and recommend improvements to resilience, security posture, operational readiness, and product supportability. - Continuous Improvement: Identify systemic issues and use insights from customer engagements to improve how MCSfMSC delivers mission-critical services. Develop and scale better practices, tools, technical readiness materials, playbooks, and lessons learned that strengthen product quality, supportability, customer experience, business operations, and future incident response. Mentor peers and share technical expertise to raise engineering capability across the team.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Computer or Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

1. 7+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical security role, including leadership of high-severity product or service incidents, crisis situations, or complex technical escalations.
2. Deep working knowledge of at least two Microsoft Security solutions (Purview, Defender, Entra, Intune, or Sentinel) sufficient to advise customers on capabilities, architecture, implementation, and operational considerations.
3. Ability to diagnose and scope complex technical issues across enterprise security environments, including interpreting logs and telemetry, assessing product behavior, and reasoning across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud architecture to validate customer impact and engage the right engineering teams.
4. Professional proficiency in written and spoken English sufficient to translate complex technical issues into clear business impacts and communicate effectively with customers, engineers, product teams, and executive stakeholders.

Other Requirements

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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

• Ability to participate in a shared, scheduled 24x7x365 on-call rotation, including occasional work outside standard business hours and on weekends.

#MSFTSecurity

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.