Principal Software Engineering Manager

• Lead a team focused on improving efficiency and fundamentals for Finance engineering services, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and efficiency

• Lead, grow, and retain a team of talented software engineers working on AI-powered developer productivity tooling.

• Partner with TPM, technical leads, and principal engineers to set team direction, prioritize work, and ensure alignment with broader CPI and Microsoft goals.

• Drive clarity on team goals, project milestones, and success metrics - translating strategy into executable plans.

• Foster a culture of experimentation and resilience, where the team feels empowered to try novel AI approaches, learn from failures, and iterate quickly.

• Own the career development of your engineers - providing regular coaching, feedback, and growth opportunities.

• Champion the use of AI in your team's daily workflows and stay current on the evolving landscape of AI developer tools and agentic systems.

• Build and maintain strong cross-team partnerships with other groups at Microsoft working on AI, developer tooling, and engineering systems.

• Recruit and hire exceptional engineering talent to grow the team.

• Contribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.

• Provide strategic direction and apply deep technical knowledge to drive measurable business impact.

• Guide technical design, dependency management, and documentation across services and platforms.

• Drive code optimization, refactoring, and reuse to improve system performance, maintainability, and ROI.

• Act as Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and lead on-call operations, ensuring system health and rapid incident response across product lines.

• Own product scalability and performance, applying engineering best practices and holding accountability for quality and customer satisfaction

Are you passionate about AI, data, and transformative user experiences? Do you bring energy, curiosity, anda strong senseof ownership to your work?, * 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., * Proven experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and career development.

• Track record of delivering software projects end-to-end: scoping, planning, shipping, and iterating along with solid communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to operate effectively across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders while being comfortable leading in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.

• Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns - multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.

• A solid software engineering background - you don't need to be writing production code daily, but you should be able to engage deeply with technical decisions, review designs, and earn credibility with high-level engineers.

• Ability to evaluate and form informed opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translate those insights into team strategy and best practices.

• Background in developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or engineering systems at scale.

• Hands-on experience (as an IC or manager) building systems that leverage Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks.

• Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.

Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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.

Microsoft is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We develop, license, and support a wide range of software products, services, and devices that help individuals and businesses realize their full potential.

Our flagship products include the Microsoft 365 productivity cloud, Windows operating system, Azure cloud platform, and Dynamics 365 business applications. We are also a leader in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, developer tools, and gaming through Xbox and Game Pass.

With operations in more than 190 countries and over 220,000 employees worldwide, Microsoft is committed to responsible innovation, inclusive economic growth, and sustainability. We work closely with governments, industries, and communities to ensure that technology serves the public good and helps address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2025, we continue to look forward—investing in AI, cloud, and quantum computing to shape the future of work, education, and society at large scale.