About this role

Overview Microsoft Specialized Clouds (MSC) delivers secure, compliant, and highly reliable cloud environments for mission-critical customers. We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager to lead planning and AI transformation for MSC engineering, driving measurable improvements in planning effectiveness, engineering execution, and delivery outcomes. In this role, you will own the strategy and execution for two connected transformation efforts across MSC. You will improve the planning lifecycle, from intake and prioritization through dependency management, capacity allocation, commitments, execution, retrospectives, and continuous learning. You will also partner with the AI v-team led by the MSC CTO to translate priority engineering scenarios into scalable AI-enabled capabilities. Across both efforts, you will establish governance and operating rhythms, and use evidence and feedback to improve engineering productivity, decision quality, and delivery performance. We are looking for an AI-forward technical program leader with hands-on experience building agentic systems and AI-powered automation and a track record of leading organization-wide change. You will work across engineering, product, data science, finance, security, compliance, and operations to build trusted solutions and influence decisions with appropriate human oversight. 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 <div>Planning</div><ul><li>Lead cross-team planning for MSC: Lead a cross-organization v-team of planning leaders throughout the planning cycle. Run the ongoing rhythm of business to align priorities, drive timely decisions, and establish repeatable planning practices across MSC. Communicate progress, risks, and decisions to executive leadership.</li><li>Refine the planning program strategy: Assess current planning operations, data, tooling, and governance; then define the vision, roadmap, adoption approach, and success measures for AI-powered semester planning across MSC.</li></ul> AI Transformation<ul><li>Shape MSC’s AI transformation strategy: Partner with the MSC CTO office and AI v-team to set priorities and maintain an outcome-focused roadmap for AI-first engineering. Identify high-impact opportunities to improve engineering workflows, assess emerging AI capabilities against organizational needs, and turn selected opportunities into actionable transformation initiatives with clear outcomes.</li><li>Drive alignment across AI transformation workstreams: Partner with engineering teams and v-team workstream leads to ensure that work on AI-enabled workflows, agentic capabilities, and shared engineering practices reflects organizational and team needs and targets clear, high-impact outcomes. Support Lighthouse experiments, challenge existing approaches, and help translate successful approaches into sustained improvements in how teams plan, build, review, and operate while maintaining security, quality, and reliability.</li><li>Measure impact and guide strategic direction: Partner with workstream and analytics leads to define success measures and assess improvements in engineering productivity, quality, and operational outcomes. Use insights and feedback to inform priorities and continuous improvement. </li></ul> Qualifications <div>Required Qualifications:</div><div><ul><li>Bachelor's Degree AND 4+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.</li><li>2+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.</li></ul> </div>Other Requirements:<ul><li>Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. </li><li>Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport.</li></ul> Preferred Qualifications:<ul><li>Experience building automation, data, and analytics solutions that improve processes, product experiences, and evidence-based decision-making.</li><li>Experience delivering AI-powered capabilities, such as copilots, agents, recommendation systems, forecasting, or workflow automation, from concept through deployment and adoption.</li><li>Strong systems-thinking skills, with the ability to connect technical, organizational, and operational dependencies and translate complexity into clear requirements, decisions, and measurable outcomes.</li><li>Ability to engage deeply with engineering teams on architecture, data models, APIs, integration, reliability, and release readiness; coding or prototyping experience is a plus.</li><li>Experience leading portfolio or planning programs in a large engineering or cloud organization and aligning teams across organizational boundaries.</li><li>Familiarity with product analytics, process mining, experimentation, causal analysis, capacity modeling, operations research, or model evaluation.</li><li>Experience operationalizing responsible AI practices, including data governance, privacy, security, compliance, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms.</li><li>Experience delivering technical programs in cloud infrastructure, specialized or sovereign clouds, government environments, or other regulated industries.</li><li>Written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence leaders, drive decisions, and align engineering and business stakeholders.</li></ul> Technical Program Management IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: <a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay">https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay</a> This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. <hr> 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 <a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html">requesting accommodations.</a>