Principal Software Engineering Manager

The People and Presence team is responsible for services that provide profile and avatar management, contacts management, @mentions, people search, and other experiences across both consumer and enterprise versions of the product. These services are the foundation for chat, channel, meetings, calendar, and other experiences across Teams product. It provides exciting opportunities in building resilient, highly available, and highly scalable services that meet the needs of an ever-growing user base of the fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. This is a unique opportunity to advance your system design, and your exposure to cutting edge technology stack (.NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Service Fabric, Redis) and application architecture skills offering end-to-end ownership and broad scope to have a huge impact.

We are seeking a motivated and dynamic Principal Software Engineering Manager to be part of a cross-functional team including product owners, architects, and developers. This is a technical management role: it requires managing an engineering team, helping set the technical direction of the team, and hands on software design and development skills. We’re looking for someone who has a demonstrated history of solving hard technical problems and is motivated to tackle the hardest problems in building full stack solutions.  An entrepreneurial approach and ability to take initiative and move fast are essential. 

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline 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.
• 3+ years of experience in people management, demonstrating the ability to lead and influence across teams.
  
• Experience in developing and operating large-scale backend services.  
  
• Experience with design, implementation in Azure Compute, Azure Storage, Azure Cache, or equivalent technology stack in other cloud providers.
  
• Experience in computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, information retrieval.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Ability to communicate technical details clearly across organizational boundaries.  
• Experience in DevOps to maintain live services and\or application frameworks.  
  
• Analytical skills with a systematic and structured approach to software design.  
  
• Experience with or exposure to Agile and iterative development processes.  
• Ability to communicate well and collaboration skills. 

Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 4, 2025

• Work with product, design and other stakeholders for understanding of requirements and turn them into architectural and design plans with implementation roadmap.
• Foster and develop talented engineers capable of developing and running scalable, reliable, maintainable services.   
• Architect, develop, and sustain large scale distributed platform services.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership: software design and development, coding, debugging complex issues, prototyping new features and reviewing code for quality.  
• Keep a focus on the usage/metrics of the owned services and be super customer focused.
• Lead, coach, and build a diverse, inclusive, high-performing team where all team members can do their best work.  Create robust career development plans to help team members grow.   
• Help the team plan and execute technical deliverables.  
• Collaborate closely with teams within Microsoft to leverage the best technology to advance the team’s mission.  
• Gain a working understanding of Microsoft as a business and collaborate with mentors and leaders to contribute to cohesive, end-to-end experiences for our users.