Director Capacity Planning

Overview

Microsoft Frontier Company is a new operating business built to deliver Frontier Transformation through AI for customers around the world. Backed by a $2.5B investment, it embeds 6,000 industry and engineering experts inside customer environments to co-design, co-innovate, deploy, and continuously improve AI systems at scale, measured by real business outcomes. It combines deep industry knowledge, change management and continuous-improvement expertise, and enterprise-grade AI engineering with the ambition to be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry.

Within Frontier Company, the Operations organization brings people, priorities, and execution together, so the business runs as one connected enterprise and shows up as a single team to the customer. Business Excellence sits within Operations and ensures seamless, customer-facing business operations across the entire portfolio, enabling clarity, operational rigor, capability growth, and continuous improvement across the business.

The Capacity Planning team is central to how Business Excellence plans and steers the business. This role owns the analytical engine behind annual planning and quarterly CFO forecasting and serves as the lead for architecture and modeling. Its broad scope gives the successful candidate a rare, enterprise-wide vantage point on demand, capacity, and financial performance as Frontier Company scales.

This is a role you will help build. You will lead the modernization and transformation of the planning and forecasting process, moving to governed, AI-enabled scenario modeling that surfaces capacity constraints, P&L implications, and trade-off choices earlier and more sharply for leadership. If you pair strong financial and analytical instincts with a passion for modeling and modern tooling, you will find few places at Microsoft with this much room to shape a new function from the ground up.

Microsofts 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.

Responsibilities

Annual Planning & Quarterly Forecasting

• Own and orchestrate the annual planning and quarterly forecasting cycles with key members of the Capacity Planning team, providing timely, clear communication of timelines, deliverables, and dependencies.
• Design, develop, and run models that size monthly demand and capacity based on available financial and operational data.
• Serve as the subject-matter expert for Budget and Forecast numbers, ready to address questions from leadership and Finance quickly and with confidence.
• Cascade targets into official dashboards and reports, and partner with Finance on analytics that connect productivity levers to revenue, COGS, and margin.

Centralized Architecture & Modeling

• Act as the key lead for centralized capacity architecture and modeling across the organization.
• Simplify the operating model by cutting model proliferation and hand-offs that create churn, rework, and slow decision velocity.
• Establish a single source of truth for demand and capacity modeling, with consistent definitions, assumptions, and controls applied across the business.

Modernization & AI Transformation

• Drive modernization of the forecasting platform, moving off a fragmented, multi-workbook ecosystem into a governed, single-source forecasting workflow.
• Lead the shift to AI-enabled forecasting, advancing from manual and automation-assisted methods to AI-led scenario modeling and risk sensing.
• Surface capacity constraints, P&L implications, and trade-off choices earlier so leadership decisions are sharper and faster.

Performance Insights & Stakeholder Partnership

• Monitor actuals for key performance metrics and proactively flag demand and capacity signals that could create P&L risk.
• Partner with Finance on month-close activities and support rhythm-of-business and ad-hoc performance reviews.
• Collaborate with teammates who lead the day-to-day stakeholder interface, applying strong leadership, influence, and cross-boundary collaboration to keep planning aligned with business priorities.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 8+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement
• OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Masters Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 12+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement

• OR Bachelors Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 15+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement

• OR equivalent experience.

• 8+ years experience leading forecasting, budgeting, or planning processes within a complex, matrixed organization.

• 8+ years experience translating complex business and financial data into clear insights and recommendations for senior leaders.

• 10+ years experience in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) expertise across annual budgeting, quarterly forecasting, long-range planning, and P&L insight.

• Advanced financial and capacity modeling skills, including building and running demand and capacity models and multi-scenario analyses that support executive decision-making.

• An analytical toolkit: the ability to structure ambiguous problems, work fluently with large and imperfect data sets, and turn analysis into defensible recommendations.

• Experience applying AI and automation to forecasting, including AI-led scenario modeling, risk sensing, and predictive planning.

• Proficiency with enterprise planning and analytics tools such as Power BI, Anaplan, advanced Excel, and comparable financial systems.

• Executive communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence decisions through clear narratives, scorecards, and business reviews.

• Leadership and influence in a matrixed, global environment, including cross-boundary collaboration and building trusted relationships at all levels.

Business Program Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $277,200 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 - $303,600 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.