Senior Principal Program Manager

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Microsoft Research is working to transform the future of artificial intelligence by bridging the gap between cutting-edge general AI and the specialized, real-world applications that drive meaningful impact. To pursue this mission, we’re building cutting-edge AI infrastructure that not only powers our models on large Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters, but also accelerates our research lifecycle. Our team has a global scope, powering the work of every Microsoft Research lab around the world. We’re looking for a Senior Principal Technical Program Manager to help our engineers and research teams go from “what if?” to “what’s next” faster and more elegantly than ever before. You will dive deep to coordinate and steer our AI-driven Tooling + Engineering System strategy and roadmap. You’ll identify the opportunities to integrate agentic automation with our broader AI infrastructure and strategically position our engineering system to rapidly accelerate the research lifecycle. As a key part of this role, you will drive strategic adoption of AI tools across all disciplines in Microsoft Research by leading a program that includes: skilling, workshops, hackathons and competitions, and org-wide newsletters. You’ll also be responsible for tracking and driving key engagement metrics. If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI and want to be part of a team that’s shaping the future of intelligent research systems, we invite you to explore opportunities with us. At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
6+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading large-scale skilling and/or adoption programs to motivate org-scale teams to adopt to rapid changes in AI-driven work.
Experience utilizing or designing engineering systems (tools and developer experiences) for large-scale machine learning, reinforcement learning, or generative AI workloads.
1+ year(s) of experience reading and/or writing code (e.g., sample documentation, product demos), ideally including experience using AI coding agents (Copilot, Claude, Codex, etc.).
Working knowledge of AI infrastructure tradeoffs - i.e. memory, network (Infiniband, NVLINK, etc.), storage systems, distributed training parallelisms and/or orchestration and scheduling frameworks (Kubernetes, Volcano, SLURM).
Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
8+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.

Responsibilities

Drive cross-team projects and programs for the AI tools and engineering system that support Microsoft Research’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) infrastructure including end-to-end planning, timelines, milestones, and performance metrics.
Research and define a seamless agent-first (Copilot, Claude, Codex, etc.) experience that accelerates both inner-loop and outer-loop research activities.
Drive initiatives to generate rapid engagement with emerging techniques in agentic research and coding.
Use AI coding agents to explore new ideas and create examples for people of all disciplines to follow your lead. When appropriate, contribute directly to our engineering system and tools.
Collaborate with researchers, engineers, product teams, and external partners to identify gaps and drive timelines toward resolution and mitigation.
Leverage data and analytics to identify opportunities for improvement, track progress, and measure the impact of adoption and skilling programs.
Foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and growth.
Communicate program strategies, progress, and results to executive leadership and key stakeholders across Microsoft Research, advocating for quality, security, and efficiency within the team.

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