Principal Software Engineering Manager
Microsoft
As a Principal Software Engineering Manager, you will provide strategic technical and people leadership for building and operating largescale, mission critical search platforms that deliver fast, relevant, and reliable experiences. This role operates with broad ownership and influence, shaping the technical direction of search systems and platforms while growing and leading high performing engineering teams.
You will work across disciplines to drive architecture, execution, and operational excellence, ensuring that search services meet the highest standards of quality, scalability, performance, and relevance.
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
- Provide technical and people leadership for one or more search engineering teams, driving the design, development, and operation of distributed search services.
- Own and influence system architecture and technical strategy for largescale search platforms, including indexing, retrieval, ranking, and relevance.
- Lead complex engineering initiatives that span multiple teams, balancing nearterm delivery with longterm architectural health.
- Partner with product management, data science, and design teams to deliver highquality search experiences aligned with business goals.
- Establish and uphold engineering best practices for availability, observability, reliability, security, and performance.
- Drive operational excellence through ownership of livesite reliability, incident response, and post incident learning.
- Lead, mentor, and grow senior engineers and engineering managers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor and escalation point for leadership on search related challenges.
- Influence organizational engineering standards and contribute to the broader engineering community.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- 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.
- Proven experience designing and delivering E2e largescale, distributed software, and frontend systems.
- Solid understanding of modern software engineering practices, including cloud based systems, microservices, and DevOps.Solid programming background in one or more languages (e.g., C++, C#, Java, React, Javascript).
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams, influence technical decisions, and deliver complex systems at scale.
- Solid communication and collaboration skills, with experience working across multiple disciplines.
Other 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:
- Master'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 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 people management experience.
- Experience building or operating search, discovery, or information retrieval systems at scale.
- Familiarity with search relevance, ranking, indexing, and query processing pipelines.
- Experience partnering with data science or ML teams to deliver relevance driven user experiences.
- Background in building high availability, low latency services with strict SLA requirements.
- Experience hiring, mentoring, and growing senior technical talent.
- Ability to operate effectively with ambiguity and influence across organizational boundaries.
#CAPIDC #searchteam
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.