IT Operations Principal; M365 Engineer

Job Description

Most Microsoft 365 jobs are about keeping the lights on. This one is about turning the lights off - on the manual work,  are looking for an engineer who treats every repetitive ticket as a bug in the system, and who works with the team to fix the system.

You will share ownership of the platform our company works in every day - Exchange, Entra , Teams, and increasingly Microsoft 365 Copilot - alongside the rest of Technology Operations. Keeping it healthy is the baseline. The actual job is making it require less human intervention each quarter than it did the last - through automation, better defaults, and self‑service that people genuinely prefer over opening a ticket.

This role suits someone who genuinely enjoys IT operations and the Microsoft platform, and who wants to spend their time working across the business - with security, compliance, the service desk, and the teams we support - to make the organization more efficient and better prepared. The measure of success here is business value: hours given back to the people we support, risk reduced, and costs avoided - delivered with a service mindset that treats every colleague as a customer whose time matters.

Automate the toil away

• Kill the repeat tickets - when the same request shows up for the third time, you and the service desk decide it is worth automating, and you build the fix instead of closing tickets faster. Power Automate, Power Shell, Microsoft Graph, Logic Apps - whatever fits.
• Build self‑service - access requests, group management, and common fixes that users can resolve without waiting on IT.
• Measure what you removed - we care about the tickets that stopped happening, not the ones you closed quickly.
• Get Copilot ready - permissions hygiene, oversharing remediation, and sensitivity labeling with security and compliance, then agents and pilots where a team has a real problem worth solving.

• Configuration as code - tenant changes should live in version control and go through peer review, not in someone's memory of what they clicked.
• Ship changes safely - test, roll out deliberately, and be able to roll back. Change management as engineering practice, not paperwork.
• Documentation and roadmap - runbooks and notes people actually trust.

The forward‑looking work only earns trust if the fundamentals hold, and the people we support feel well served day by day. A meaningful share of the role is still hands‑on operations:

• Exchange Online and Entra  - mail flow, connectors, transport rules, and email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC);
  Conditional Access, MFA and passwordless rollouts, SSO integrations, directory sync, and privileged access.
• Tier‑3 escalation for M365 issues - root cause analysis that produces a permanent fix - plus a shared on‑call rotation and occasional maintenance windows.

We care more about how you think than about the exact boxes you tick. If you meet most of this and are genuinely interested in the rest, apply.

• You've run M365 in production - roughly 3‑5 years administering a real tenant with real users, including Exchange Online and Entra .
• You script by default - Power Shell is your reflex, and you have used Microsoft Graph to do things the admin portals cannot.
• You debug to root cause - authentication failures, mail delivery problems, and sync errors get investigated - and what you find gets written up and shared, not just restarted.
• You're already curious about Copilot - whether through hands‑on admin work, building agents, or serious self‑directed learning.
• You write well - clear documentation and plain‑language explanations for non‑technical colleagues. This matters more on a remote team.
• You work well with others - …