IT Operations Principal (M365 Engineer)

Cornerstone Building Brands; North Carolina; Remote; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

PTO

Paid holidays

FSA

Life insurance

401k

Job summary

Cornerstone Building Brands in Cary, North Carolina, is seeking an IT operations engineer to cut manual work on the Microsoft 365 platform by automating repeat tickets, building self-service, and delivering measurable business value.

You will share ownership of Exchange Online, Entra ID, Teams, and Copilot readiness, focusing on configuration as code, safe change management, documentation, and a supportive on-call rotation across teams.

Qualifications

• Experience in IT operations with Microsoft 365.
• Ability to automate repetitive tasks and reduce ticket volume.
• Experience with security, compliance and identity management.
• Strong collaboration with service desks and security teams.

Responsibilities

• Automate repetitive tickets using Power Automate, PowerShell, Graph.
• Build self-service access requests and group management.
• Measure ticket reductions and business value.
• Prepare Copilot readiness and hygiene for security and compliance.
• Manage Exchange Online and Entra ID operations.
• Provide Tier-3 escalation for M365 issues.

Skills

Microsoft 365 IT operations

Automation engineering

PowerShell

Power Automate

Security & compliance awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Power Automate

PowerShell

Microsoft Graph

Logic Apps

Bicep

Job description

Cornerstone Building Brands, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, is the largest manufacturer of external building products in North America with over $6billion in annual revenue and an expansive North American footprint that includes almost 20,000 employees, operating in +70 manufacturing facilities, supported by a network of +80 distribution and branch office facilities. We have a broad product offering with a well-regarded brand portfolio including the #1 position in windows, vinyl siding, metal accessories, metal roofing and wall systems, and insulated metal panels. We believe every building we create, and every part of that building, positively contributes to communities where people live, work and play

Most Microsoft 365 jobs are about keeping the lights on. This one is about turning the lights off — on the manual work, at least. We are looking for an engineer who treats every repetitive ticket as a bug in the system, and who works with the team to fix the system.

You will share ownership of the platform our company works in every day — Exchange, Entra ID, Teams, and increasingly Microsoft 365 Copilot — alongside the rest of Technology Operations. Keeping it healthy is the baseline. The actual job is making it require less human intervention each quarter than it did the last — through automation, better defaults, and self-service that people genuinely prefer over opening a ticket.

This role suits someone who genuinely enjoys IT operations and the Microsoft platform, and who wants to spend their time working across the business — with security, compliance, the service desk, and the teams we support — to make the organization more efficient and better prepared. The measure of success here is business value: hours given back to the people we support, risk reduced, and costs avoided — delivered with a service mindset that treats every colleague as a customer whose time matters.

What You'll Actually Do

Automate the toil away

• Kill the repeat tickets — when the same request shows up for the third time, you and the service desk decide it is worth automating, and you build the fix instead of closing tickets faster. Power Automate, PowerShell, Microsoft Graph, Logic Apps — whatever fits.
• Build self-service — access requests, group management, and common fixes that users can resolve without waiting on IT.
• Measure what you removed — we care about the tickets that stopped happening, not the ones you closed quickly.
• Get Copilot ready — permissions hygiene, oversharing remediation, and sensitivity labeling with security and compliance, then agents and pilots where a team has a real problem worth solving.

Treat the tenant like a platform

• Configuration as code — tenant changes should live in version control and go through peer review, not in someone's memory of what they clicked.
• Ship changes safely — test, roll out deliberately, and be able to roll back. Change management as engineering practice, not paperwork.
• Documentation and roadmap — runbooks and notes people actually trust.

Keep the core solid

The forward-looking work only earns trust if the fundamentals hold, and the people we support feel well served day by day. A meaningful share of the role is still hands-on operations:

• Exchange Online and Entra ID operations — mail flow, connectors, transport rules, and email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC); Conditional Access, MFA and passwordless rollouts, SSO integrations, directory sync, and privileged access.
• Tier-3 escalation for M365 issues — root cause analysis that produces a permanent fix — plus a shared on-call rotation and occasional maintenance windows.

We care more about how you think than about the exact boxes you tick.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on work with Copilot Studio, declarative agents, or Graph connectors.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Bicep, Terraform, Azure Automation) or CI/CD applied to tenant configuration.
• Defender for Office 365 or Defender for Identity.
• Hybrid Exchange or migration experience, including tenant-to-tenant moves.
• Certifications such as MS-102, SC-300, or AZ-104 — useful signal, not a requirement.
• Experience in a regulated environment with formal audit requirements.

Working Here

• Fully remote, with a preference for candidates in the Eastern or Central time zone so there is real overlap with the team.
• Less than 25% travel for occasional team meetings and site visits.
• On-call rotation shared across the team — nobody carries it alone.
• Education: a degree in a technical field is welcome, and equivalent hands-on experience is equally welcome.

Why work for Cornerstone Building Brands?

Our teams are at the heart of our purpose to positively contribute to the communities where we live, work and play. Full-time* team members receive** medical, dental and vision benefits starting day 1. Other benefits include PTO, paid holidays, FSA, life insurance, LTD, STD, 401k, EAP, discount programs, tuition reimbursement, training, and professional development.

*Full-time is defined as regularly working 30+ hours per week.**Union programs may vary depending on the collective bargaining agreement

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Note: Disclosure as required by