Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft•,

4d•$142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS-Core) accelerates customer outcomes and business growth by aligning product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around customer needs. Its Customer Innovation Engineering team operates within the Office of the CTO and focuses on Microsoft's Cloud and AI Platform. The team works with strategic Azure customers and translates customer experience into improvements to Azure services. This is a U.S.-based, deeply technical player-coach role. The manager leads a geographically distributed engineering pod across North America while maintaining hands-on individual-contributor responsibilities in product development, engineering execution, and customer engagements. The position contributes to an observability-focused Azure service approaching General Availability and works across product engineering, customer environments, and production operations to improve how cloud workloads are designed, monitored, and operated at scale. The role combines software design and development, technical decision-making, code reviews, architectural guidance, customer problem-solving, and people management. It includes setting technical direction and priorities, coaching engineers, managing delivery, and balancing immediate customer needs with long-term product investments. The manager also participates in on-call operations, investigates incidents, and drives improvements to service resilience and operational excellence. The position is based in the United States; Microsoft cannot sponsor a work visa for this role. The successful candidate must pass the 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 such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, 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.
Significant professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating complex cloud-native applications and distributed systems.
Demonstrated experience leading and developing engineering teams, including people management, technical mentorship, and delivery ownership.
Hands-on proficiency with one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
Experience designing and delivering production-grade software, with direct technical contributions to complex engineering initiatives.
Deep knowledge of cloud architecture, distributed systems, microservices, messaging and integration patterns, and scalable application design.
Infrastructure expertise, including practical experience with Azure services across compute, storage, networking, and application hosting.
Experience with modern software delivery practices, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, blue/green and canary deployment strategies, and production operations.
Experience with containerized workloads and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
Communication and collaboration skills to work across distributed teams and engage with customers and senior technical stakeholders.
Experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
Experience in a player-coach engineering leadership role combining hands-on development with people management and technical direction.
Experience building and operating cloud services at scale, particularly in observability, monitoring, diagnostics, or reliability engineering.
Experience with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), incident management, on-call operations, and improving production system reliability.
Experience working directly with enterprise customers on complex cloud architecture, application modernization, or production engineering challenges.
Experience translating customer feedback and field requirements into product capabilities and engineering investments.
Experience leading geographically distributed engineering teams across multiple locations and time zones.
Commitment to continuous learning, technical curiosity, and staying current with Azure innovations and broader trends in cloud architecture, distributed systems, and AI.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
4+ years of people management experience.
3+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering, agentic systems, and emerging approaches to cloud operations and observability.

Responsibilities

Work directly with strategic Azure customers to design, build, and optimize production-grade Azure applications, reduce technical debt, and enable scalable architectures.
Contribute to the design, development, and continuous improvement of an observability-focused platform capability for monitoring, diagnostics, and operational visibility.
Support live production environments through on-call participation, incident investigation, and engineering improvements to reliability and performance.
Develop reusable technical assets, tools, guidance, and reference implementations that support repeatable customer success and Azure adoption.
Collaborate with Azure product teams to share real-world customer experience and drive improvements to Azure services.
Develop and support technical teams across MCAPS-Core to deepen engineering expertise and delivery quality.
Lead and develop a geographically distributed engineering team by providing technical direction, coaching, and people management while contributing hands-on.
Set priorities, align engineering work with business goals, and lead cross-team initiatives that deliver customer impact and long-term technical value.
Participate directly in software design, development, code reviews, architectural guidance, technical decisions, product features, fixes, and complex engineering initiatives.
Balance near-term customer needs with long-term product investments, translating field insights into improvements to Azure services.
Drive production reliability and service operations, including on-call work, incident investigation, and improvements to resilience and operational excellence.