Blake Smith Staffing, LLC
Associate Director, Microsoft Platform Engineering
Blake Smith Staffing, LLC, Austin, Texas, United States, 78799
Associate Director, Microsoft Platform Engineering
(Player-Coach)
Location: Austin, TX / Remote
Team: Platform Engineering
Reports to: Director, Head of Platform Engineering
Work style: Hands-on manager (~50% building, ~50% leading)
Scope & impact
Own the Microsoft platformEntra ID/Azure AD, M365 Core (Exchange Online, Teams), Power Platformand Microsoft licensing. Drive a hard pivot from clickops to platform-as-code (Git-first, policy-as-code, pipelines, drift detection). Partner with Security (Intune, Defender, Purview) and Workplace Technology (including Service Desk) to land the right operating model. This is a technical Associate Director role: you design, build, review PRs, lead incidents, manage outcomes, and develop the team. What youll own and deliver Identity & Access (Entra ID/Azure AD). Sustain and evolve our modern identity posture (SSO,
CA, PIM, SCIM, app registration/consent hygiene) with change control, telemetry, and safe rollout patterns. M365 Core (Exchange & Teams). Tenant guardrails, transport hygiene (SPF/DKIM/DMARC),
Teams policy baselines (external/guest/meeting/retention), published SLOs and golden dashboards. Power Platform at scale. Environment strategy, DLP guardrails, ALM pipelines & solution
checker, maker program (enablement + monitoring), connector governance; reliability for business-critical apps/flows. Microsoft Licensing (program owner). EA strategy/renewals/true-ups, SKU mix/right-sizing (E1/E3/E5/F3, add-ons), allocation hygiene, usage analytics, cost optimization, vendor management, Finance reporting. M365 Training Portal (product owner). Own the portals roadmap, curriculum, governance, and adoption; integrate with LMS/Viva as needed; partner with the SharePoint-owning team for implementation. Automation & IaC. GitLab pipelines, Terraform (AzureAD/M365) where sensible, Microsoft
Graph/PowerShell tooling, policy-as-code, drift detection with auto-remediation, auditable change history. Reliability & Incidents. Incident command for the Microsoft stack; RCA/postmortem program with tracked corrective actions; SLO/error budget management. Team development. Hiring pipeline, onboarding, skill matrix, growth plans, coaching, and a healthy on-call standard. Build a team that ships platforms as code. Not in scope to own: SharePoint architecture (coordinate only). 12-month outcomes (hold us to these) Automation. 90% of owned configuration managed as code (PR-gated) with auditable pipelines; high-risk drift auto-remediated. No-clickops. 80% reduction in portal-only changes; exceptions documented with a time-boxed path to code. Reliability. Published SLOs for Exchange/Teams; >99.9% availability; #ZR
Own the Microsoft platformEntra ID/Azure AD, M365 Core (Exchange Online, Teams), Power Platformand Microsoft licensing. Drive a hard pivot from clickops to platform-as-code (Git-first, policy-as-code, pipelines, drift detection). Partner with Security (Intune, Defender, Purview) and Workplace Technology (including Service Desk) to land the right operating model. This is a technical Associate Director role: you design, build, review PRs, lead incidents, manage outcomes, and develop the team. What youll own and deliver Identity & Access (Entra ID/Azure AD). Sustain and evolve our modern identity posture (SSO,
CA, PIM, SCIM, app registration/consent hygiene) with change control, telemetry, and safe rollout patterns. M365 Core (Exchange & Teams). Tenant guardrails, transport hygiene (SPF/DKIM/DMARC),
Teams policy baselines (external/guest/meeting/retention), published SLOs and golden dashboards. Power Platform at scale. Environment strategy, DLP guardrails, ALM pipelines & solution
checker, maker program (enablement + monitoring), connector governance; reliability for business-critical apps/flows. Microsoft Licensing (program owner). EA strategy/renewals/true-ups, SKU mix/right-sizing (E1/E3/E5/F3, add-ons), allocation hygiene, usage analytics, cost optimization, vendor management, Finance reporting. M365 Training Portal (product owner). Own the portals roadmap, curriculum, governance, and adoption; integrate with LMS/Viva as needed; partner with the SharePoint-owning team for implementation. Automation & IaC. GitLab pipelines, Terraform (AzureAD/M365) where sensible, Microsoft
Graph/PowerShell tooling, policy-as-code, drift detection with auto-remediation, auditable change history. Reliability & Incidents. Incident command for the Microsoft stack; RCA/postmortem program with tracked corrective actions; SLO/error budget management. Team development. Hiring pipeline, onboarding, skill matrix, growth plans, coaching, and a healthy on-call standard. Build a team that ships platforms as code. Not in scope to own: SharePoint architecture (coordinate only). 12-month outcomes (hold us to these) Automation. 90% of owned configuration managed as code (PR-gated) with auditable pipelines; high-risk drift auto-remediated. No-clickops. 80% reduction in portal-only changes; exceptions documented with a time-boxed path to code. Reliability. Published SLOs for Exchange/Teams; >99.9% availability; #ZR