Software Engineering Manager (AI-native development)

Software Engineering Manager (AI-native development)

Overview

If you love the pursuit of excellence and are inspired by the challenges that come through driving innovations that impact how the world lives, works and plays, then we invite you to learn more about Microsoft Business Operations (MBO) - and the value we deliver across Microsoft and to our customers and partners. We offer unique opportunities to work on interesting global projects in an environment that appreciates diversity, focuses on talent development and recognizes and rewards great work.

 

As a Software Engineering Manager, you’ll support, coach, and lead the teams that build and operate the platforms powering how Microsoft does business - growing engineers, driving delivery, and solving complex, high-impact problems at global scale.

Position Description

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of engineers to design, develop, and operate software solutions across a set of products and services, while owning the growth, development, and performance of the people on your team. You will partner with product managers, technical leads, and cross-functional stakeholders to confirm customer and business requirements and guide your team in translating them into secure, reliable, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

 

You will lead the disciplined use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle, ensuring your team takes responsibility for the content of its AI-generated artifacts and integrates Responsible AI practices. You will own and lead architecture discussions and complex design reviews, guide test strategy and security testing, manage dependencies across teams, and uphold Microsoft standards of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility. As a people manager, you will model our culture, coach your team, and care for each individual - driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance.

 

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead across the engineering lifecycle for a set of products and services - guiding your team to design, code, test, deploy, and operate solutions that are secure, reliable, accessible, and maintainable - while delivering success through your people. You will own architecture decisions, drive project planning, lead the disciplined use of AI tools across the development lifecycle, and manage the growth, development, and performance of your engineers.

• People management. Deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring - live our culture and values, define team objectives and outcomes, enable success across boundaries, and help the team adapt and learn. Attract and retain great people, know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations, and invest in the growth of others while driving employee development, project execution, and performance management.
• AI-native development. Lead your team in the disciplined use of AI tools and practices across the full software development lifecycle, ensuring engineers take responsibility for the content of their AI-generated artifacts and incorporate Responsible AI practices. Coach the team on applying engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE, Engineering System Success Playbook) to improve processes, and champion experimentation with new AI tools and practices.
• Coding. Guide your team within and across teams to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that adheres to design specifications. Lead efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, and cost; provide deep expertise on coding and validation strategy; and lead the identification and escalation of blockers, communicating how they impact timelines.
• Code reviews. Coach engineers to review product and test code for team standards, correct test coverage, coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices. Conduct timely reviews that accelerate the team’s pace, consider diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability, and ensure automated source-code analysis is built into the development process.
• Design and architecture. Own and lead architecture discussions and design decisions for complex products and solutions, testing and exploring design options, outlining strengths and weaknesses, and recommending the best approach. Create and review architecture and design documents, evaluate new technologies, and ensure designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost (COGS), security, and privacy requirements. Review complex designs within and across teams to recommend improvements.
• Testing and quality. Guide your team in creating clear test strategies that ensure solution quality and prevent regression, incorporating security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Lead efforts to close test gaps, improve suite speed, reliability, and defect localization, ensure testable code, and leverage AI tools for test automation.
• Customer requirements. Guide partnership with internal and external stakeholders (e.g., product managers, privacy/security subject matter experts, technical leads, customer escalation teams) to confirm customer and user requirements and their feasibility. Leverage a variety of feedback channels to incorporate customer insights into current and future designs, and advocate for the security and privacy needs of customers.
• Dependencies and coordination. Lead the identification of dependencies and incorporate them into design documents, demonstrating deep understanding of upstream and downstream interactions across the entire stack. Negotiate across teams to resolve conflicts over dependency ownership and required work, and drive agreements that align dependent teams to the delivery schedule.
• Planning and implementation. Drive multiple groups’ project plans, release plans, and work items in coordination with stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers). Break long-term vision into milestones, guide estimation, anticipate future goals to plan resources, and ensure security, privacy, and compliance requirements are accounted for in planning, including capacity, failover, and backup/restore for disaster recovery.
• Deployment and velocity. Act as an expert in safe deployment, establishing standards and following safe-change practices to minimize adverse impact to users. Drive comprehensive deployment automation targeting zero-touch deployment, ensure a CI/CD infrastructure that promotes developer and operational agility, monitor dependency status so only the latest secure versions ship, and define when rollback plans should be enacted.
• Experimentation. Guide team experiments that determine the effectiveness of changes using feature flags and flighting, ensuring the correct telemetry is in place, interpreting results, and making ship decisions. Ensure engineers have time and resources to experiment, and drive collaboration with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to incorporate success and guard-rail metrics.
• Engineering excellence. Act as an expert in best practices and secure design principles, building code on well-established methods and formally validating security invariants. Guide tool development and responsible reuse of open-source and internal code, advocate for GenAI tooling to enhance engineering productivity, and keep the team’s skills current through learning sessions and evaluation of new trends, technical solutions, and patterns.
• Live site and reliability. Guide your team as designated responsible individuals (DRIs), leading on-call coverage, incident response, and retrospectives that identify root causes and repair actions using least-privilege access. Establish playbooks, guidelines, and processes; ensure responses meet SLA; drive reductions in incident volume and severity; and champion a live-site-first mentality with comprehensive observability and monitoring.
• Telemetry and monitoring. Integrate, design, and review logging and instrumentation across the team to gather telemetry on performance, reliability, availability, utility, and safety, and to support security investigation for both live and A/B experiments. Lead the classification and analysis of complex data, drive outputs (e.g., notifications, dashboards) that improve monitoring, and coach the team on the privacy implications of telemetry changes.
• Security, privacy, and compliance. Coach the team to apply security best practices and model “security as code,” incorporating deployment gates, scanners, and security monitoring to prevent regressions and vulnerabilities. Collaborate with security partners to define security promises and invariants, validate threat models and premortems, and establish breach drills and incident response. Ensure the correct processes for privacy, safety, and accessibility, maintain visible evidence of compliance, and stay current on global and local regulations.
• Collaboration and communication. Communicate clearly and respectfully - verbally and in writing - to drive collaborative, mutually beneficial outcomes; negotiate and resolve conflict across teams; and contribute to an inclusive culture and a growth mindset.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Experience leading and developing engineering teams - coaching engineers, managing performance, and investing in the growth, capabilities, and aspirations of others.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years people management experience.
• Experience owning and leading architecture discussions and complex design reviews, applying reference architectures and patterns for resilient, scalable systems (e.g., advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, big data, Internet of Things, modern applications, or data platform modernization).
• Hands-on experience using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle in a disciplined manner, taking responsibility for the content of AI-generated changes to artifacts and reviewing all changes.
• Experience driving project and product planning and quality assurance across the engineering lifecycle, including task estimation, design and code review, specification review, bug triage, test targeting, and release readiness.
• Experience building secure software and meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, including secure-by-design principles, threat modeling, and privacy considerations.
• Experience with logging, telemetry, monitoring, and live-site operations, including leading on-call/DRI rotations, incident response, and postmortems to maintain reliability and availability.
• Experience managing dependencies and collaborating across teams to align schedules, resolve conflicts, and reach common goals.
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and systems-thinking skills, applying a data-driven approach to extract actionable insights and make sound decisions in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.

Experience communicating clearly and respectfully - verbally and in writing - and negotiating to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes across teams and stakeholders.

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.

Experience Level

Senior Level