The Personalized Data Product area builds the per-user content and context foundation that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to understand what matters to each person. The Principal PM Architect will define the product architecture and multi-year strategy that connect personalized impact, activity context, and trusted content into a coherent platform for Copilot and adjacent Microsoft experiences.
This role operates at the intersection of product strategy and technical architecture. The successful candidate will shape platform contracts, evaluation and diagnostics, scalable retrieval and indexing, signal quality, freshness, access control, and extensibility across Copilot, search, connectors, and agentic experiences. They will turn customer needs and system evidence into durable architectural decisions, measurable product outcomes, and aligned execution across teams.
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.
Responsibilities
- Define the end-to-end product architecture and multi-year strategy for Personalized Data across the Personalized Impact, Personalized Context, and Personalized Content pillars.
- Translate priority user jobs, customer feedback, and quality signals into platform requirements, architectural principles, sequencing, and measurable product outcomes.
- Establish clear product contracts for personal activity signals, dependency and availability semantics, index and query behavior, latency, freshness, restrictions, and platform integration.
- Architect an operating model for impact measurement, scenario-based evaluation, per-answer attribution, diagnostics, and test environments that predict real user outcomes.
- Lead product architecture for a complete, fresh, secure, fast, and predictable personalized index, including search-stack isolation, capacity strategy, access-control freshness, and runtime enforcement.
- Drive extensibility across Copilot, Microsoft 365 search, Windows Search, connectors, and agentic orchestrators, including support for new activity signals and content classes.
- Partner deeply with engineering, data science, applied research, security, privacy, compliance, and product teams to resolve cross-layer tradeoffs and deliver coherent platform capabilities.
- Create decision frameworks and architecture narratives that make complex choices explicit, including customer value, quality, cost, latency, reliability, trust, and ecosystem impact.
- Provide technical product leadership across the organization by mentoring PMs, raising product architecture quality, aligning senior stakeholders, and communicating decisions to executive audiences.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
- Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
- 4+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).
- 6+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).
- 6+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).
- Demonstrated experience leading technically complex platform products from strategy and architecture through execution, adoption, and measurable outcomes.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, search and indexing, retrieval and ranking, data platforms, or AI/ML product architecture.
- Ability to convert ambiguous customer and business needs into clear technical requirements, platform contracts, product roadmaps, and success measures.
- Experience building product measurement systems, evaluation frameworks, observability, or cross-layer debugging capabilities for complex services.
- Proven ability to influence and align engineering, data science, security, compliance, and partner teams without relying on direct authority.
- Solid written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architectural choices, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and executive audiences.
- Sound product judgment in privacy, permissions, access control, responsible AI, reliability, and enterprise trust.
- Ability to operate effectively in a high-ambiguity environment, connect long-range architecture with near-term delivery, and adapt plans as evidence changes.
- Ability to collaborate across organizational boundaries and lead decisions that span multiple products, services, and partner teams.
- Experience with Microsoft 365, Copilot, enterprise search, personalization, semantic retrieval, or knowledge systems.
- Experience designing user-context, activity-signal, memory, or recommendation platforms that serve human and agent-driven scenarios.
- Experience with large-scale, multi-tenant services and architectures that balance latency, freshness, cost, capacity, security, and availability.
- Experience defining reusable platform APIs, contracts, schemas, or integration models used by multiple product teams.
- Track record of setting technical product direction, developing other product leaders, and driving decisions with senior engineering and business stakeholders.
Product Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.
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