AdTech Platform Engineering Lead

Overview

We are looking for an Adtech Platform Engineering Lead to join our AdTech and Marketing Technology organization. This role is responsible for leading a team that designs, builds, and operates the web platform capabilities that power high traffic marketing experiences across Microsoft. This is a player coach role. The AdTech Platform Engineering Lead is expected to both manage and develop a high performing engineering team and remain hands on as the technical authority for platform architecture, shared services, reliability, security, and operational excellence.

The role sits at the intersection of business capability needs and technical execution-translating evolving marketing and product requirements into a clear, deliverable platform roadmap. The ideal candidate combines strong people leadership, deep technical expertise in modern web platforms (cloud hosted services, CI/CD, observability, edge/CDN, and performance), and a proven ability to operate business critical, privacy sensitive systems at scale.

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Delivery

* Lead, mentor, and grow a team of platform engineers, setting clear expectations for ownership, quality, security, and operational excellence.

* Translate business and product requirements into a prioritized technical delivery plan, roadmap, and backlog for shared web platform capabilities.

* Balance delivery speed with long term platform health through clear architectural direction, sound engineering practices, and disciplined execution.

Hands On Technical Ownership

* Act as the hands on technical authority for web platform architecture; design, review, and directly implement complex or high risk components as needed.

* Own the end to end web platform lifecycle, from developer experience and build/release pipelines through runtime infrastructure, traffic management, and production operations.

Platform Standards, Governance & API Management

* Define and enforce platform standards for service templates, logging/metrics, configuration, dependency management, and release practices.

* Establish and manage service contracts, versioning, and change management processes with consuming product teams.

* Ensure consistent patterns for authentication/authorization, identity propagation, and secure defaults across platform components.

Reliability, Observability & Operations

* Define and own availability, latency, and reliability SLOs/SLAs for critical web platform services.

* Build and operate observability (metrics, logs, traces), alerting, dashboards, and automated runbooks.

* Own on call readiness, incident response, root cause analysis, and preventative remediation for business critical services.

Privacy, Compliance & Audit Readiness

* Partner with privacy, legal, and security teams to ensure privacy by design, consent handling, data minimization, and compliant data usage.

* Maintain audit ready documentation including data lineage, classifications, access controls, and operational controls.

Cross Functional Leadership

* Serve as the primary technical point of accountability across

Web engineering, Marketing Measurement, Analytics, and Platform teams.

* Communicate clearly with technical and business stakeholders on tradeoffs, risks, and delivery progress.

Other

* Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

* Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

* OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

* Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

* OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

* OR equivalent experience.

* 4+ years people management experience, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team development.

* 8+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or SRE, owning large scale production web services.

* 5+ years of experience translating business and product needs into technical architecture and executable delivery plans.

* 4+ years of experience in security, privacy, and compliant…