Principal Site Reliability Engineering Manager

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Are you a Principal Site Reliability Engineering Manager interested in improving the reliability of large-scale engineering systems serving multiple major Microsoft divisions? Are you seeking an opportunity to transform how we deliver engineering services, built on a foundation of SRE principles and practices like automated monitoring and alerting, automatic failover, and broadscale service best practices? Are you motivated by coaching and people leadership, helping a team of diverse SREs to unlock their full potential? If so, we have an opportunity for you. The ES365 org is responsible for the engineering systems, tools, and services that comprise the end-to-end developer experiences for the teams that build Office, Exchange, and Microsoft 365, and who work in our largescale web frontend monorepo. Our areas of ownership cover source control, check-in processes, build, validation, and deployment automation. Reliability and operational proficiency are critical to keeping engineering teams productive, and our business needs have shifted from local on-prem operations experience to building and operating reliable cloud services at scale. The Principal Site Reliability Engineering Manager will work effectively with a range of stakeholders, from executives to engineers, balancing near-term reliability improvements with long-term resilience strategies. You will drive cross-org partnerships, establish service level objectives (SLOs) and indicators (SLIs), and lead incident response and continuous improvement through Engineering Service Reviews, SRE service coownership campaigns, and establishing updated service best practice. We believe that significant achievements happen within high-functioning, trust-filled teams. A reliable manager ensures success in execution, promotes career growth, and cultivates a culture centered on customer focus, collaboration, diversity, and inclusion. If you are committed to improving engineers' productivity and satisfaction through reliable, scalable tool and service operations, consider joining ES365. Be at the core of Microsoft and help shape the future of Engineering Systems by raising the bar on availability, performance, and operational success. 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.

Requirements

Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

3+ years of people management experience
5+ years of experience planning, designing, implementing, and delivering large initiatives spanning multiple engineers as the primary owner, including operating and improving production services at scale
Experience leading reliability engineering for developer-facing or platform services, including incident response, automation/toil reduction, and observability (metrics/logs/tracing) built on top of mature observability platforms and practices
Experience working across disciplines, groups, and teams to align reliability priorities and delivery plans
Experience architecting, deploying, and operating enterprise scale distributed cloud services (Azure preferred), including containerization and orchestration
Experience operating engineering systems outer loop processes (CI/CD, build, and release platforms) with reliability, safety, and governance practices

Responsibilities

Partner with engineers, product managers, and partner teams to design, operate, and maintain reliable and resilient services, with clear operational requirements (monitoring, alerting, runbooks, capacity, and failure modes).
Drive cross-org alignment through partnerships and co-development following the “One Microsoft” philosophy, including shared reliability standards and operational tooling.
Build, grow, and retain a team of Site Reliability Engineers.
Provide mentorship and coaching on reliability engineering, incident response, and pragmatic automation—within and beyond your team.
Define, implement, and operate SLOs/SLIs and error budgets for critical engineering systems services; use them to guide prioritization and continuous improvement.
Lead incident management for your services, including on-call health, escalation paths, blameless post incident reviews, modeling follow-through on corrective and preventive actions.
Drive automation to reduce toil and improve operational efficiency across build, validation, and deployment systems (e.g., self-healing, safe rollouts, and automated remediation).
Establish observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and performance management to meet reliability and latency goals at scale.
Foster a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self, while holding a high bar for customer impact and reliability.
Embody our culture and values.