The Office of the CTO for Microsoft is chartered with understanding, shaping, and accelerating technologies and their impact on Microsoft, industry, and society in order to empower every person and every organization to achieve more. Whether it is providing insights company-wide, giving meaning to an “AI First” company, or helping to drive impact of “Intelligent Cloud/ Intelligent Edge Computing,” the Office of the CTO is down in the trenches, working with our engineering, field, and strategy teams across the company.  

The Technical Advisor role extends the capacity of CTO and CTO’s broader team by generating research, synthesizing insights into specific technical domains and topics, supporting cross-industry partnerships, and driving initiatives that span across the organization.  This requires multiple teams to collaborate towards common goals and engage in activities that inform the CTO, the SLT, and move the needle on Microsoft’s strategic and technical direction. 

The role requires tight coordination and collaboration with the individual engineering leaders including Technical Fellows and Distinguished Engineers and with engineering teams, TA to CEO, Corporate Strategy group, and a few other roles/teams that have cross-engineering responsibilities. She/he will help the CTO with technical prioritization decisions, key industry technical and social trends, and similar research priorities. The priorities for this role will be flexible and range from immediate needs to long-term objectives. 

#OCTO

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities will include:   

Research the deep domain and topics to synthesize key opportunities, issues, and progress to date. Generate briefs that synthesize shared and divergent points of view and positions. The research scope may vary from small investigations (for example, the art in speech recognition) to substantial areas (for example, the three most likely directions in cloud computing evolution).  

  

Drive projects that require collaboration from multiple teams across the organization while sharing a common strategic vision. Help teams evolve their understanding of a new Microsoft culture of engineering, in partnership with the engineering leaders who develop and prescribe such new evidence-based practices.   

  

Produce, for CTO and other involved senior engineering leaders, reading materials with summations, highlighted focus areas for deep processing, and prioritized order of consuming these reading materials. The reading may include a broad range of materials (academic research, business media and consultancies reports, white papers of internal teams, etc.). Subsequently, the time required for individual investigations will vary.  

  

Engage with CTO on iterative investigations as needed. Keep drilling down into certain areas based on the CTO’s request and personal sense of company priorities/market trends. Create and maintain iterative mini-brainstorms to ensure alignment with CTO thought leadership and just-in-time fluidity of investigation efforts.   

  

Produce a range of recommendations to Microsoft based on research. Those may range from directions to individual solutions, depending on the topic, scope, and complexity.  

  

Use a broad range of information sources: Internal Microsoft / LinkedIn and external like academic institutions, start-ups, established technology companies, research establishments, etc.   

Qualifications

The ideal candidate will have demonstrated expertise in research, engineering and product development. She/he will be acknowledged as a deep expert in technical domains with exceptional systems thinking ability, have a reputation as a credible thought leader, be respected by product and technical teams, and proven to expand thinking beyond internal Microsoft mindsets. Experience building and shipping consumer products at scale, at Microsoft or other consumer internet companies, is a plus. 

Ideally, the candidate should be able to demonstrate the following: 

Required: 

8+ years (10+ preferred) of demonstrated experience in Technical Program Management, Software Engineering, or Data Science 

Demonstrated history of engineering and product expertise. 8+ years of experience building software for customers, using Microsoft or non-Microsoft technologies  

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related Engineering field 

  

Preferred: 

Experience as a team leader/manager of an engineering and/or PM team  

Demonstrated history of engineering and product expertise with several years of experience building products for customers, preferably direct-to-user or consumer products. 

Someone who has developed a good intuition for driving product engagement and growth through data-driven experimentation. 

A broad technology perspective: Areas where we focus and partner across Microsoft include business applications, cloud/infrastructure, gaming, consumer, developer, productivity, web experiences, operating systems, and identity. While we don’t expect everyone to go deep in all these areas, having a broad understanding of several of these is key to spanning the organization effectively.  

Great sense of aesthetics for developer APIs, SDKs and tools. Likely having built SDKs and open-source frameworks in the past and demonstrated the ability to drive 3rd party developer adoption. 

Deep understanding and experience with the open-source community; specifically, an ability to drive initiatives within the space and incorporate relevant developments into our technical roadmap. 

Strong product building ethos – user experience obsession, data and metrics driven, hypothesis led experimentation, etc. 

Ability to handle high ambiguity, drive clarity, and identify/prioritize issues and opportunities  

Ability to communicate thoughts at the appropriate level of abstraction in a clear/crisp manner to Senior Leaders 

Be able to lead through influence, work across teams at scale, and feel confident engaging with executives 

Ability to build relationships with thought leaders from open-source communities, industry, and research 

Believes doing the right thing is more important than proving we are right.   

Shows a high level of EQ and humility by working collaboratively and helping others be successful.  Our success is the success of partners and collaborators.  

Strong operational program manager that is relentless in the pursuit of our shared success. 

Master or PhD in Computer Science or related Engineering field preferred 

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.