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.

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