Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.     

Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) is the engine that powers Microsoft’s core cloud platforms and services that millions of people use every day. With more than 95% of Fortune 500 business on Azure, 180 million using Office 365, and millions using other services – all running on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure – CO+I builds and operates the foundation upon which Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization comes to life.     

The Core Datacenter Services (CDS) organization designs and delivers solutions that support global datacenter operations and improve service availability. CDS is helping CO+I advance a customer-focused, data-driven, live-service culture by transforming telemetry into actionable intelligence.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead a globally distributed engineering team building a self-service test and validation platform for datacenter critical-environment sensors and telemetry. The platform will enable engineers, operators, and domain experts to create reusable automated tests that continuously validate telemetry quality, sensor behavior, data completeness, and system health, with integrated monitoring, reporting, and actionable alerting. You will define the platform strategy and architecture, develop a high-performing engineering team, and partner across engineering and operations to deliver a secure, reliable, scalable solution that improves engineering velocity and operational reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, grow, and develop a diverse, globally distributed team of software engineers, creating an inclusive culture of accountability, collaboration, customer focus, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
• Define and communicate the vision, architecture, roadmap, and execution strategy for a self-service platform that enables engineers, operators, and domain experts to author reusable automated tests that validate sensor and telemetry health.
• Partner across engineering, operations, product management, data science, and domain teams to translate operational risks and telemetry-quality requirements into scalable platform capabilities and drive adoption across the organization.
• Establish a clear platform ownership and extensibility model that enables users to safely create, validate, deploy, and maintain tests while the platform team owns the frameworks, execution infrastructure, reliability, security, governance, and support model.
• Drive architectural and engineering decisions for highly available, scalable services that process large volumes of telemetry with appropriate latency, resiliency, observability, security, privacy, and cost efficiency.
• Define and report against measurable service and platform outcomes using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, OKRs, and operational metrics to evaluate reliability, adoption, test effectiveness, alert quality, engineering velocity, and customer impact.
• Establish mechanisms that improve telemetry and detection quality, including visibility into telemetry loss, stale or invalid sensor values, test coverage, false-positive and false-negative rates, detection latency, remediation time, and platform availability.
• Drive engineering fundamentals and live-site excellence, including design and code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, secure development, observability, operational readiness, incident response, and durable improvements from incidents and near misses.
• Lead complex cross-organizational execution, clarifying priorities, resolving ambiguity, managing dependencies and risk, and influencing senior leaders and partner teams through sound technical judgment, data-driven recommendations, and clear communication.
• Build organizational capability and a strong talent pipeline through thoughtful hiring, coaching, career development, succession planning, and meaningful growth opportunities for engineers and future leaders.

Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

OR equivalent experience. 

Background Check Requirements: 

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.
• Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport.

 Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. 
• 4+ years of people-management experience, including responsibility for hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Experience leading the design, development, and operation of production software platforms, distributed systems, cloud services, developer platforms, or site reliability engineering solutions.
• Experience establishing engineering plans, technical roadmaps, service metrics, and measurable goals for a team or service.
• Experience partnering across organizational and disciplinary boundaries to deliver complex technical programs.

• Experience building test frameworks, validation platforms, developer platforms, or self-service systems that enable engineering or operational teams to author, deploy, and operate automated tests at scale.
• Experience with telemetry pipelines, time-series data, sensor validation, anomaly detection, or data-quality monitoring, including systems that identify and alert on production or service-health issues.
• Experience designing and operating highly available cloud services using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, availability targets, capacity planning, observability, and incident-management practices.
• Demonstrated success using metrics and OKRs to connect engineering investments to measurable outcomes, such as reliability, platform adoption, test effectiveness, operational efficiency, engineering velocity, and customer impact.
• Experience with modern software engineering and DevOps practices, including Git, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated unit and integration testing, secure development, and progressive deployment.
• Production experience with cloud-scale data, compute, monitoring, and visualization technologies, such as Azure Data Explorer/Kusto, Azure Monitor, Event Hubs, Azure Functions, Azure Kubernetes Service, Power BI, Grafana, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams and influencing across organizational boundaries, with demonstrated success developing strong engineers and future leaders while creating alignment, accountability, and effective operating rhythms.
• Experience with or understanding of datacenter infrastructure and operations, including critical-environment systems, telemetry, monitoring, reliability, or other technologies used to operate large-scale datacenter environments.

#COICareers | #EPCCareers | #DCDCareers

Software Engineering M5 - 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.