Associate Director, Microsoft Platform Engineering

Job DescriptionJob DescriptionAssociate 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 platform—Entra ID/Azure AD, M365 Core (Exchange Online, Teams), Power Platform—and 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 you’ll own and deliver • & Access (Entra ID/Azure AD). Sustain and evolve our modern 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 portal’s 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;