Senior SEO & AI Search Lead

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.

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 MBR 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 without direct authority, creating clarity in ambiguity, anticipating risks and opportunities, and rallying partners around a shared point of view.
• Embody our Culture  & Values.  

Required/minimum qualifications -

• 6+ years of hands-on, enterprise-level SEO experience, with a proven track record of driving measurable growth in organic visibility, qualified traffic, rankings, engagement, and/or revenue.
• Experience building and executing SEO strategy across large-scale sites, global markets, and complex stakeholder environments.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and present to senior leaders, translating a technical domain into a clear organizational point of view and leadership-ready narratives.
• Working knowledge of AI Search / AI SEO concepts—AI citations, answer-ready content, LLM-readable experiences, and how generative answer systems are changing organic discovery.
• Strong technical SEO foundation: crawlability, indexation, canonicalization, redirects, robots directives, structured data/schema, JavaScript rendering, and site migrations.
• Proficiency with SEO, analytics, and reporting platforms (e.g., Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Power BI, enterprise SEO and crawling tools, competitive-intelligence tools).
• Experience developing content strategy tied to search demand and customer intent, ideally across multiple markets or languages.
• Experience managing SEO vendors/agencies—statements of work, budgets, deliverables, and reporting rhythms. Additional or preferred qualifications.
• Experience developing AI Search playbooks, readiness frameworks, or measurement approaches for large enterprise brands.
• Experience with product feed optimization, catalog enrichment, taxonomy, JSON-LD, or AI shopping readiness.
• Familiarity with international/localization workflows, regional enablement, and global center-of-excellence models.
• Experience supporting major product launches, ecommerce migrations, or large-scale content updates.
• Familiarity with SEM/paid search and how organic and paid insights inform broader digital marketing decisions.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web-performance considerations.

eCommerce IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 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 $137,600 - $222,600 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, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.