Karim Khidr

Karim Khidr is a Senior Service Engineer with more than 20 years of experience spanning enterprise cloud operations, incident management, service delivery, automation, and customer-facing technical leadership. Over the course of his career, he has developed extensive expertise in managing complex operational environments while steadily expanding his focus on cybersecurity through academic research, advisory work, and industry engagement.

At Microsoft, Karim serves in high-impact customer response and service engineering roles across Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Copilot. He supports global enterprise and sovereign cloud customers during complex live-site incidents and customer-impacting escalations. His work is centered on minimizing customer impact, enhancing service reliability, and enabling engineering and operational teams to respond effectively to high-severity incidents.

A significant aspect of Karim’s role involves improving incident management practices through the design and implementation of automation and AI-assisted workflows. He has led initiatives that strengthen escalation handling across the incident lifecycle, including triage, routing, communications, service health visibility, and incident follow-through. More recently, he has focused on applying Agentic AI within engineering operations to enhance incident summarization, triage, routing, and action-oriented automation while maintaining a strong emphasis on reliability, quality, and human oversight.

Alongside his work at Microsoft, Karim has continued to deepen his cybersecurity expertise through a Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust, advisory contributions with isdigital.ae, and applied research mentoring. He played a key role in the launch of DCSH.AE, a cybersecurity-focused digital platform, contributing to content oversight, trainer evaluation, and operational development. He has also mentored Master’s students on cybersecurity projects connected to his dissertation research.

Karim’s professional experience combines deep expertise in live-site operations and escalation leadership with strong cross-functional collaboration and execution. He regularly works across support, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), engineering, and stakeholder teams to coordinate mitigation and resolution efforts, improve observability, and drive operational excellence through the use of telemetry, SQL, KQL, dashboards, and low-code engineering solutions.

His core areas of expertise include Customer Response Engineering, Microsoft 365, enterprise and sovereign cloud operations, cybersecurity, incident management, live-site operations, escalation leadership, Power Platform, SQL, KQL, telemetry, service reliability, automation, Copilot, Agentic AI, technical program delivery, and executive communication.