Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for email semantic indexing supporting Outlook search and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The role owns the index lifecycle and operational health, and leads development of ways to experiment with and productionize new indexing approaches. It focuses on improving freshness, completeness, performance, and cost efficiency while proactively resolving cross-team dependencies and constraints.

The manager partners with product, relevance, model, and engineering teams to turn promising approaches into production-ready capabilities, using shared quality and cost evidence to guide decisions. The role sets technical direction for content processing, embedding generation, index updates, and retrieval integration; guides architecture, design, testing, deployment, and continuous integration; and uses telemetry and controlled experiments to evaluate system behavior and downstream retrieval impact.

As a people leader, this position develops engineers, establishes clear accountability, supports career growth, and fosters an inclusive culture of technical excellence and continuous learning. It embeds security, privacy, reliability, regulatory compliance, and Responsible AI throughout the software development lifecycle, and leads disciplined use of AI tools for development, testing, debugging, and operational workflows.

The position includes people-management responsibilities such as employee growth and development, project execution, and performance management. Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including a Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements.
• Must pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or bachelor's degree and 12+ years of experience.
• 4+ years of people management experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop the team; foster an inclusive, accountable, learning-oriented culture; support career growth; provide actionable feedback; and manage performance.
• Set technical direction and own architecture discussions and design decisions for email semantic indexing, including content processing, embedding generation, index updates, and retrieval integration.
• Evaluate technologies and balance quality, freshness, scalability, resiliency, and cost.
• Partner with product management and engineering stakeholders to clarify requirements, define success measures, and convert priorities into an executable roadmap.
• Lead planning, resource allocation, and dependency management; resolve cross-team issues and deliver end-to-end results.
• Guide development of extensible, maintainable, secure, and high-performance software; establish design and code reviews, test strategies, security testing, and automation across development and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own service health and operational readiness, including safe deployments, flighting, monitoring, incident response, production debugging, live-site ownership, escalation paths, disaster recovery, and rollback plans.
• Use incident retrospectives to address root causes and prevent recurrence.
• Establish telemetry and evaluation practices to assess indexing behavior and downstream retrieval impact; use feature flags, controlled experiments, and production signals to validate changes and guide investment.
• Apply least-access principles and ensure email content and derived indexes respect access controls and applicable data-handling requirements.
• Embed security monitoring, response readiness, AI safety, and compliance with privacy, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
• Lead disciplined adoption of AI tools for development, testing, debugging, and operational workflows; measure effectiveness, maintain human accountability for quality, and improve engineering practices continuously.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional information is available at the linked Microsoft careers pay and benefits page.

What This Job Offers

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