Sr Security Ops Engineering Manager

Overview

The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.

The Identity & Access Management (IAM) Protect team within the CISO organization is seeking a Security Operations Engineering Manager to lead our Identity Operations function. This role is responsible for driving operational excellence across Microsoft Identity services by owning on-call and DRI coverage, ensuring reliable production support, and setting the direction for automation that reduces undifferentiated operational work and improves service reliability. The manager will establish a strong culture of first-contact resolution, shift-left practices, and root-cause-driven problem solving to minimize customer disruption, while ensuring operational insights and customer feedback are systematically fed back into IAM service teams to improve platform quality and experience. The ideal candidate brings strong identity domain knowledge, proven operational leadership, and a passion for developing engineers, with a forward-looking mindset toward leveraging AI-assisted insights to continuously raise the maturity of identity operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Identity Operations team, managing shift schedules, on-call rotations, and team rosters to ensure continuous coverage and reliable support for identity services.
• Oversee day-to-day security operations across Microsoft Entra ID and Azure Active Directory, including authentication, authorization, directory services, and identity lifecycle operations.
• Drive a culture of operational excellence by setting standards for first-contact resolution, shift-left practices, and proactive incident management.
• Provide guidance and support for troubleshooting complex identity-related issues, including MFA and Conditional Access failures, SSO and token errors, service principal misconfigurations, device join issues, and directory synchronization errors.
• Monitor service health, identity logs, and alerts at the team level, ensuring timely mitigation of risks, compliance adherence, and platform reliability.
• Lead post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis, translating insights into automation, self-service tools, and process improvements to reduce manual effort and recurring issues.
• Collaborate with engineering partners to implement automation-first solutions, improve operational workflows, and incorporate customer feedback into service refinements.
• Mentor, develop, and coach team members on technical skills, operational best practices, and incident management.
• Work in scheduled shift and on-call rotations to provide continuous operational support for identity services.
  
  

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in security operations, IT operations, technical support, or engineering roles supporting production systems, including several years leading teams or managing operations coverage.
• Demonstrated experience managing team schedules, shift rotations, and on-call coverage to ensure operational reliability.
• Strong understanding of identity and access fundamentals, including authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, certificate-based authentication) and common token flows.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD, including MFA, Conditional Access, session controls, Privileged Identity Management (PIM), and identity lifecycle operations.
• Experience supporting directory synchronization and device identity, including Entra Connect or Cloud Sync, Azure AD joined, hybrid joined, and registered devices, and understanding how device posture influences Conditional Access.
• Working knowledge of application identity, including app registrations, delegated and application permissions, consent flows, API scopes, and identifying common configuration issues.
• Ability to analyze identity logs and telemetry (sign-in, audit, token, provisioning) using tools like the Azure portal, KQL, Graph Explorer, Azure Monitor, or IcM.
• Demonstrated troubleshooting and automation mindset, with experience mentoring engineers, improving operational processes, and driving automation-first solutions.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience administering Microsoft Entra ID / Azure Active Directory.
• Familiarity with automation tools and source control, including Git/GitHub and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with monitoring and incident management tools such as Azure Monitor, Kusto, Grafana, or IcM.
• Strong interest in improving operational reliability, team efficiency, and customer experience.
• Practical scripting experience using PowerShell and/or Python.
• Proven ability to lead and develop high-performing teams, with experience in coaching, career development, and fostering operational excellence.
  
  

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.

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