Lead Principal Customer Solution Engineer

The Windows Commercial Acceleration Engine (WCAE) team is building a customer solution engineering capability that works directly with strategic enterprise customers to solve their most consequential Windows technical challenges.

Be part of a culture that pursues and celebrates excellence and drives innovation where success is a shared journey from a One Microsoft approach.

As a Lead Principal Customer Solution Engineer, you will join the Windows Commercial Acceleration Engine (WCAE) team as part of the Windows Ecosystem and Commercial Engagement (WECE) organization in Windows + Devices.

In this role, you will lead a geographically distributed team of engineers supporting strategic customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). You will combine deep technical expertise with solid people leadership to help customers solve complex Windows challenges while developing a world-class engineering team.

This is a hands-on leadership role. This role is expected to remain technically engaged, working directly with customers, guiding technical investigations, reviewing solution approaches, and helping resolve the most complex customer challenges. You will need to also drive technical excellence, build scalable operating practices, and represent customer needs to Windows leadership & engineering teams.

Success in this role will be measured through team development & leadership, customer impact, operational excellence, and the creation of reusable solutions, tools, guidance, and engineering insights that scale beyond individual customer engagements. This work will be pivotal to the success of the Windows Commercial business.

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

Build and lead a high performing team:

• Hire, develop, coach, and retain a team of customer solution engineers.
• Create an inclusive, collaborative, and growth-oriented team culture.
• Establish clear expectations, career development plans, and technical growth opportunities.
• Support engineers through technical challenges, customer situations, and professional development.
• Build organizational capability through mentoring, knowledge sharing, and succession planning.

Drive technical excellence in the team:

• Act as an executive escalation point for complex customer situations.
• Ensure engagement quality, customer satisfaction, and measurable business outcomes across the EMEA portfolio.
• Guide the team through complex technical investigations involving telemetry, diagnostics, logs, traces, automation, and engineering analysis.
• Review technical approaches and ensure solutions meet standards for quality, reliability, security, maintainability, and supportability.
• Foster solid engineering fundamentals, diagnostic rigor, and operational excellence across the team.

Directly lead engagements with customers as a hands-on leader:

• Embed with strategic enterprise customers to understand device performance, reliability, boot and sign-in experience, battery life, application responsiveness, system resource utilization, and operational workflows. Use telemetry, traces, logs, dumps, diagnostics, and customer evidence to identify performance bottlenecks, reliability failures, regressions, and systemic issues.
• Build and implement technical resolution and modernize device management to resolve install base health challenges. Design and implement solutions with customers. When needed, develop prototypes, scripts, diagnostic tools, configuration changes, and implementation approaches, then validate them in customer environments to demonstrate measurable improvements. Apply solid engineering fundamentals including security, privacy, maintainability and supportability. Validate solution in customer environments to demonstrate measurable improvements.

Scale successful approaches for broad impact:

• Identify patterns across customer environments and convert findings into reusable diagnostics, troubleshooting methodologies, automation, telemetry insights, and engineering recommendations.
• Elevate the team by creating structure and space to share expertise across the team, partners, field, support teams, and product groups so each engagement increases the capability of the broader ecosystem.

Partner across Microsoft:

• Build solid partnerships with Windows engineering teams, specialists, support organizations, account teams, and field leadership.
• Represent EMEA customer needs and technical priorities in broader planning discussions.
• Align customer engagements with strategic organizational objectives and engineering investments.

Deliver measurable customer and business outcomes:

• Demonstrate improvement in customers install base health through customer evidence, telemetry, validation results, or agreed success measures.
• Help restore customer confidence in Windows and strengthen the role of Windows in customers’ future endpoint, security, management, and AI-platform strategies.
• Build trusted relationships with customer technical leaders, Microsoft field teams, and product engineering teams.
• Communicate technical findings, tradeoffs, risks, decisions, and progress clearly to customer engineers, IT leaders, Microsoft field teams, product engineers, and executives.
• Contribute to the evolution of the Windows Commercial Acceleration Engine strategy and operating model.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Lead Principal Customer Solution Engineer AND technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
  • OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience managing geographically distributed engineering teams.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers to understand complex technical environments, diagnose problems and identify root cause, and implement or validate solutions.
• Experience building customer-facing engineering, escalation engineering, support engineering, or technical consulting capabilities.
• Technical experience with enterprise Windows device management, including several of the following areas: Microsoft Intune, Windows Autopilot, device provisioning and enrollment, configuration and policy management, application management, OS and update management, endpoint security, compliance, and device health.
• Experience troubleshooting complex device-management issues using data, logs, telemetry, diagnostic tools, and structured problem-solving methods.
• Experience creating scalable engineering practices, operational rhythms, and delivery models.
• Ability to synthesize information from multiple sources, identify systemic patterns and root causes, and translate findings into practical customer solutions and actionable product feedback.
• Experience collaborating across customer, field, support, and product engineering teams to drive technical issues from discovery through resolution.
• Ability to communicate complex technical findings, risks, and recommendations clearly to technical and executive audiences.
• Experience with Microsoft Consulting Services, Industry Solutions, Customer Success, FastTrack, or a comparable enterprise technology consulting organization.

#W+DJOBS

Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across United Kingdom is £ 93,500.00 - £ 161,800.00 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.

Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/corporate-pay/united-kingdom-corporate-pay.html

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.