Senior Director, Data Platform Engineering

Are you passionate about data and inspired by the opportunity to shape the future of marketing at Microsoft? Do you thrive at the intersection of business strategy, technical depth, and platform-scale problem-solving? If so, we invite you to join us in a critical leadership role.

Marketing at Microsoft sits at the strategic apex of the company—connecting product, sales, and customer engagement. At the heart of this complex and dynamic ecosystem lies data: vast, distributed, and rich with potential. We are building a world-class data platform to harness that potential—one that federates across a wide network of engineering teams, while centralizing what matters most to enable speed, trust, and actionable insights.

The Global Marketing Engines and Experiences (GMEE) Data Engineering team is on a mission to deliver a connected and intelligent data ecosystem that fuels personalized, impactful, and data-driven marketing at scale. We’re designing for a world where reusable data building blocks flow through a discoverable marketplace, analytics are democratized, and insights emerge in real time from both the edge and the core.

We are looking for a Senior Director of Data Platform Engineering to lead the development and evolution of this strategic platform. You will be responsible for architecting and operating a modern, federated data environment that integrates with Microsoft’s broader data engineering fabric—empowering analysts, data scientists, Machine Learning engineers, and business decision-makers across marketing and beyond.

This role requires a leader who can operate at scale, align deeply with business goals, and solve tough technical problems—like metadata-driven governance across teams, balancing decentralization with coherence, and enabling edge innovation without sacrificing data integrity. Most of all, it’s an opportunity to shape how one of the world’s largest companies uses data to connect meaningfully with every customer. Join us and help turn Microsoft Marketing into a model of data-powered transformation for the industry.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling or data engineering work
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6 + year(s) experience in business analytics, data science, software development, or data engineering work
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience in building and operating Cloud Services and Distributed Systems.
• 6+ years of experience in modern data architecture patterns and practices including logical and physical data modeling, semantic modeling, metadata, streams, serialization, and serving layers.
• 6+ years of experience working in large scale data warehousing, data lakes, distributed data processing, algorithmic processing (AI/ML [Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning] workloads) and advanced analytics concepts.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 15 + years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling or data engineering work
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years of business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling or data engineering work experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 7+ years people management experience.
• High level of technical proficiency in Azure cloud data analytics and AI/ML services, and advanced working knowledge of BI (Business Intelligence), Reporting and Data Visualization development.
• Significant capability and history of growing partnerships by forging a strong relationship with internal/external clients, understanding their objectives, and recommending best strategies.
• Comfortable making hard decisions using a blend of quantitative and qualitative inputs and thinking strategically with methodical execution.

Data Engineering M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.

Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until June 29th, 2025.

#EandEjobs

• Understand our business strategy and needs, partnering with teams across Marketing and Microsoft to build and advance the vision for data capability investments
• Provide technical leadership for identification of dependencies across teams and translate vision and strategy into impact
• Run secure, reliable data platform cloud services 24/7 that customers across Marketing rely on for their day to day operations
• Collaborate with operational, analytic and partner teams to drive alignment on data strategy, architecture, and implementation, building towards a cohesive and unified data ecosystem to serve all of Marketing
• Partner with key engineering teams across Microsoft to establish and achieve shared goals and outcomes and contribute to the larger cross-Microsoft data estate vision
• Foster a culture of agility, innovation, and customer-focus within the team
• Embody our culture and values.