PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENG MGR

Overview Commercial Engineering & AI (CEAI) partners closely with stakeholders to accelerate the transformation of Microsoft’s commercial business into a frontier organization. We bring together AI‑native engineering, modern platforms, and deep commercial insight to reimagine how work gets done - at scale and with impact.

Our mission is to unlock new ways of operating through intelligent systems while creating the conditions for our teams to do the most meaningful work of their careers. If you’re excited to build, experiment, and shape the future of commercial execution with AI at the core, we invite you to apply.

Responsibilities Responsibilities: Lead, grow, and retain a team of talented software engineers working on AI-powered developer productivity tooling. Partner with technical leads and principal engineers to set team direction, prioritize work, and ensure alignment with broader organizational and Microsoft goals.

Drive clarity on team goals, project milestones, and success metrics — translating strategy into executable plans. Foster a culture of experimentation and resilience, where the team feels empowered to try novel AI approaches, learn from failures, and iterate quickly.

Own the career development of your engineers — providing regular coaching, feedback, and growth opportunities. Champion the use of AI in your team's daily workflows and stay current on the evolving landscape of AI developer tools and agentic systems.

Build and maintain strong cross-team partnerships with other groups at Microsoft working on AI, developer tooling, and engineering systems. Recruit and hire exceptional engineering talent to grow the team. Contribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.

Qualifications Required Qualifications Bachelor's/Masters Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Proven experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and career development. A solid software engineering background – You should be hands on with design and coding, able to engage deeply with technical decisions, review designs, and earn credibility with high-level engineers.

Track record of delivering software projects end-to-end: scoping, planning, shipping, and iterating along with solid communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to operate effectively across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders while being comfortable leading in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.

Expereince in production and livesite management for business-critical services, ensuring high availability, reliability, performance, and fast incident response. Drive proactive monitoring, alerting, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvements to reduce customer and partner impact.

Partner with engineering, stakeholders, support and product teams to improve service health, operational readiness, and live-site excellence.: Preferred Qualifications Personal experience using AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as: GitHub Copilot — AI pair programming, CLI and outcome-oriented development Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.

Hands-on experience (as an IC or manager) building systems that leverage Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks. Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Ability to evaluate and form informed opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translate those insights into team strategy and best practices. Background in developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or engineering systems at scale. #CEAIjobs This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances.

If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.