Principal Product Manager

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

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 connecting personalized impact, activity context, and trusted content into a coherent platform for Copilot and adjacent Microsoft experiences.

This role combines 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. The role turns 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. Employees work with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate toward shared goals, guided by respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
• 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.
• Ability to influence and align engineering, data science, security, compliance, and partner teams without relying on direct authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining 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 spanning multiple products, services, and partner teams.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor’s degree and 12+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market, including design, product-market fit, and launch.
• 6+ years of experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market.
• 6+ years of experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience.
• Experience with Microsoft 365, Copilot, enterprise search, personalization, semantic retrieval, or knowledge systems.
• Experience designing user-context, activity-signal, memory, or recommendation platforms for human- and agent-driven scenarios.
• Experience with large-scale, multi-tenant services and architectures balancing 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.

Responsibilities

• Define 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 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 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 choices explicit, including customer value, quality, cost, latency, reliability, trust, and ecosystem impact.
• Provide technical product leadership by mentoring PMs, improving product architecture quality, aligning senior stakeholders, and communicating decisions to executive audiences.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal