Senior SEO & AI Search Lead

** Overview*
* The  
** Senior SEO & AI Search Lead
** owns the organic discovery and content strategy for Microsoft's digital storefront-ensuring customers find, understand, and choose Microsoft products across traditional search, AI-powered answer engines, and every global market. This is a senior individual-contributor role that blends strategy with execution: you will set and drive the organization's point of view on SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and personally lead the technical, content, and measurement work that brings it to life.

As the organization's authoritative voice on search, you will represent this space to senior leaders-presenting to and influencing stakeholders up to the VP level-translating the fast-moving shift toward AI-driven discovery into a clear, actionable roadmap and rallying partners across product, engineering, design, merchandising, and regional teams to deliver it. The role centers on four pillars-search strategy, global content, execution, and measurement-backed by the executive influence to make search a priority across the organization.

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*
* ** SEO and AI SEO strategy:*
* + Own and drive the organization's point of view on SEO and AI SEO - setting the strategy, roadmap, and prioritization for the digital storefront and establishing a clear, evidence-based perspective on the future of AI-driven discovery, AI citations, and shifting customer behavior.

+ Translate industry and platform shifts into priorities-turning a fast-changing search landscape into concrete direction and recommendations for the team and leadership.

+ Drive a unified discovery framework that spans on-site content, technical infrastructure, and off-site signals that influence how search engines and AI systems represent Microsoft.

+ Grow qualified traffic, engagement, and revenue from organic search and emerging AI discovery channels.

** Global content strategy:*
* + Define and drive the global content strategy that makes Microsoft's products discoverable and decision-ready across markets-anchored in customer intent, use cases, and emerging AI discovery patterns.

+ Build scalable, answer-ready content frameworks-FAQs, buying guides, comparison and product-education experiences, and templates-that perform for both organic and AI search.

+ Partner with content, studio, and regional teams to scale content through a center-of-excellence model, ensuring consistency, localization quality, and AI/LLM readiness worldwide.

+ Identify content gaps and search-demand opportunities and turn them into a prioritized, measurable content roadmap.

+ Cross-functional execution:
Provide SEO and AI SEO requirements, on-page recommendations, and launch QA for product launches, page migrations, and priority campaigns.

+ Partner with web engineering to improve crawlability, indexing, schema, structured data, metadata, and rendering, and to prioritize the technical roadmap for search.

+ Influence product feed, catalog, and taxonomy quality so Microsoft's pages, feeds, and partner platforms send consistent, trusted signals to search engines and AI systems.

+ Integrate search and content priorities into campaign planning, content roadmaps, and go-to-market moments across teams.

** Measurement, tooling, and vendors:*
* + Establish a credible source of truth for AI-search visibility-running measurement pilots and evaluating vendors and tools for AI citations, brand mentions, and answer presence.

+ Define KPIs and reporting that connect visibility and content investments to business outcomes, including M  inputs and executive-ready dashboards and narratives.

+ Manage vendor, agency, and toolset relationships across technical SEO, reporting, keyword research, content optimization, and AI visibility-owning deliverables, budget tracking, and escalations.

+ Executive influence and thought leadership:
Serve as the organization's authoritative voice on search, presenting to and influencing senior leaders up to the VP level and shaping how the organization thinks about SEO and AI SEO.

+ Bring a clear, evidence-based perspective that shapes leadership discussions rather than reacting to them, and elevates the importance of search within the broader marketing and commerce agenda.

+ Distill complex technical, content, and AI-search topics into compelling business narratives and leadership-ready recommendations for executive, product, engineering, agency, and non-specialist audiences.

+ Influence across teams…