Director of Commercial Brand Management & Systems

Overview

At Microsoft, we're building a modern, AI-forward marketing organization that learns faster, activates smarter, and drives measurable impact. We blend human creativity with AI-powered systems to build a bold, coherent brand at scale, prioritizing outcomes over outputs and uniting disciplines around the customer.

Microsoft's commercial brand is one of our most valuable assets, and this role helps ensure it shows up as a competitive advantage that customers experience at every touchpoint.

The Director of Commercial Brand Management & Systems owns Microsoft's commercial brand as a living, scalable system — building and operating the AI-enabled tooling, content systems, and governance that apply the brand consistently, instantly, and at scale across every customer touchpoint. It pairs enduring brand fundamentals with the modern, hands-on skills a fast-moving AI market now demands.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will shape positioning, architecture, and identity, and carry those decisions all the way through to execution, building strong in-house capability and sweating the details of how the brand shows up. The best brand decisions come from the people closest to the business and the product, amplified by AI, and you will lead a team of senior practitioners who work that way.

AI is core to how this role operates. You will use AI-enabled tools and workflows to create and govern the brand at scale, freeing human judgment for the highest-value creative and strategic decisions. The work is anchored in customer obsession, using data and insight to understand and shape how the brand is experienced, and judged by practical, measurable outcomes.

Key outcomes: a commercial brand that stands out as a competitive advantage in market; a brand system that applies consistently and at scale across every touchpoint; faster speed to market; and a high-performing, modern brand team. Success is measured by brand attribution and preference, customer comprehension and navigation of the portfolio, speed to market, and the quality and efficiency of the brand system.

At Microsoft, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth-mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress across people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what is next for everyone.

Responsibilities

Own the commercial brand as a living system

• Own Microsoft's commercial brand end to end — strategy, architecture, identity, and how it shows up in market — owning both the strategy and its implementation.
• Set brand strategy grounded in practice, applying brand fundamentals to a fast-moving AI market and evolving commercial-customer expectations, and translating them into decisions the organization can act on immediately.
• Own the frameworks, standards, and governance that keep the brand coherent as the portfolio and products evolve.
• Partner with creative, content, and customer marketing teams so the brand is expressed consistently across every channel and campaign.

Build and operate AI-first brand and content systems

• Bring a marketing-engineering mindset: design, build, and operate AI-enabled brand and content systems that apply the brand at scale.
• Own the tooling and automation roadmap for brand governance, content generation, and quality control, applying AI to accelerate production, review, and portfolio analysis.
• Use AI-enabled workflows to govern the brand at scale, reserving human judgment for the highest-value creative and strategic decisions.
• Stand up the data and measurement instrumentation that shows how the brand is experienced and where the system needs to improve.

Build in-house capability and lead execution

• Own execution end to end, building strong in-house capability and tooling to deliver the work with speed and craft.
• Develop strong internal capability across core brand disciplines — from naming and architecture to content — so the team delivers high-quality work quickly.
• Set a high operating standard for speed and craft, with a team that sweats the details and moves quickly.
• Establish clear quality bars and ways of working, and hold the team to them.

Put the customer at the center

• Use data and AI-driven insight to understand how commercial customers actually experience the brand across touchpoints, and shape the system accordingly.
• Ensure the brand reflects a fast-evolving product and the real needs of customers.
• Tie brand decisions to measurable customer outcomes — comprehension, navigation of the portfolio, preference, and trust.

Lead and develop the team

• Lead and develop a team of senior brand practitioners, setting a high bar for craft and growth.
• Champion a hands-on, AI-forward way of working across the team.
• Model an ownership and builder's mindset, raising the bar on craft and hands-on delivery.
• Influence and secure decisions with senior executives across the marketing and commercial organization, representing brand with clear rationale, evidence, and trade-offs.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years work experience at a branding agency or with product marketing, brand building, and/or strategy development
• OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience leading brand strategy and management for a large, complex technology portfolio, including 10+ years building and leading high-performing teams in global, matrixed organizations.
• Demonstrated experience owning brand strategy end-to-end, including positioning, brand architecture, naming, visual and verbal identity, and successful in-market execution.
• Experience building and operating brand, content, or marketing systems at scale, including governance, standards, processes, and tooling that enable consistent brand application globally.
• Hands-on experience applying AI, automation, and emerging technologies to brand, content, and marketing workflows, with the ability to design and scale AI-enabled marketing systems.
• Experience leading brand strategy for enterprise and commercial technology businesses, including areas such as cloud, AI, data, security, or other complex B2B offerings.
• Experience using customer, market, and brand performance insights, including brand equity and tracking research, to guide strategy, prioritize investments, and measure impact.
• Proven ability to build and scale internal brand and content capabilities, reducing reliance on external execution through effective tools, operating models, and organizational development.
• Demonstrated success partnering across creative, product marketing, product, legal, regional marketing, and agency ecosystems to drive brand consistency, localization, and business outcomes at global scale.

Brand M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 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 $165,600 - $272,300 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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status,