Senior Principal Technical Program Manager

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d

About The Position

The Office of the CTO (OCTO) for Microsoft is chartered with understanding, shaping, and accelerating technologies and their impact across Microsoft, industry, and society. OCTO leads investments in emerging technical bets, provides technical insights, and drives high-priority company-wide Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives, while partnering with our engineering, field, and strategy teams. As part of this, OCTO is responsible for Microsoft’s technical strategy for the use of OpenAI technology across Microsoft. OCTO operates as a high‑leverage organization – partnering deeply across engineering, product, research, and leadership to influence technical direction, execution integrity, and long‑term strategy.
We are seeking a Senior Principal Technical Program Manager to operate as a companylevel technical and execution leader, driving outcomes across multiple organizations and influencing Microsoft’s most critical AI and platform priorities. This role is reserved for leaders who routinely operate at the executive and architectural boundary, shape ambiguous problem spaces before they become programs, and establish durable mechanisms that scale well beyond their direct scope.
As a Senior Principal Technical Program Managerin OCTO, you will set direction as much as you drive delivery—defining the “what” and “why,” not just the “how.” You will partner closely with senior engineering leaders, researchers, and executives to frame complex, multiyear initiatives, resolve systemic execution and dependency challenges, and ensure Microsoft’s most strategic technical bets are delivered with coherence, rigor, and responsibility.
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.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's Degree AND 15+ years experience engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
• 1+ year(s) of experience reading and/or writing code (e.g., sample documentation, product demos).
• Track record of developing and launching successful AI products.
• Foundation in AI technical skills, such as understanding Machine Learning (ML)/Reinforcement Learning (RL), AI models, building AI services or products, as well as AI infrastructure, compute, hardware, and optimization.
• Possess analytical acumen, vigilant adaptability, and critical architect design for assessing AI infrastructure, hardware, compute capability, services and tooling to enable acceleration of our bold AI ambitions.
• Demonstrated history of engineering and product expertise with experience building AI services or products for customers and launching them to solve high value problems.
• Ability to handle high ambiguity, drive clarity, and identify/prioritize issues and opportunities among a wide variety of Stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate thoughts both verbally and in written form at the appropriate level of abstraction in a clear/crisp manner to Senior Leaders, including ability to escalate appropriately where needed.
• Be able to lead through influence, work across teams at scale, and feel confident engaging with Executives
• Ability to earn a high level of trust by working collaboratively and helping others be successful. Our success is the success of partners and collaborators.

Responsibilities

• Help set direction on big technical bets by framing messy, ambiguous problems, figuring out what’s worth exploring, and guiding early validation work across multiple teams.
• Keep a wide, practical view of the technical landscape — across Microsoft and the broader ecosystem — to spot real risks, emerging opportunities, and meaningful shifts in AI that leadership should pay attention to.
• Bring together signals from research, industry, and internal work to influence where Microsoft invests, what we prioritize, and how we think about longterm product and platform direction.
• Lead crosscompany efforts where alignment is the hard part, working with senior engineering and product leaders to agree on goals, tradeoffs, and how success will be measured — and putting lightweight structure in place so work actually moves.
• Act as a trusted technical sounding board for the CTO and Senior Leaders, turning complex topics into clear narratives, decision briefs, and reading syntheses that help leaders understand what matters and what to do next.
• Turn research and technical insight into guidance teams can actually use, whether that’s strategic direction, architectural recommendations, or targeted experimentation to answer the right questions.
• Remove friction that slows adoption of strategic technologies, by identifying systemic blockers, influencing norms and incentives, and helping teams translate strategy into day-to-day execution.

What This Job Offers

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