Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS-Core) accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.
The Customer Innovation Engineering team operates within the Office of the CTO for the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS-Core) organization, which focuses on Microsoft's Cloud and AI Platform. With more than 45,000 employees worldwide, MCAPS-Core is responsible for the strategy, design, and delivery of Microsoft's end-to-end customer experience. Join MCAPS-Core OCTO and help build a future where customers choose Microsoft not only for industry-leading products and services, but also for a differentiated and deeply connected engineering experience.
We are looking for a Principal Engineering Manager based in the United States to join our diverse, talented, high-performing, and growing Customer Innovation Engineering (CIE) team. This is a unique player-coach role combining hands-on software engineering, technical leadership, strategic customer engagement, and people management. You will lead a distributed engineering pod across North America while maintaining direct individual-contributor (IC) commitments across core product development, engineering execution, and complex customer engagements.
This is a deeply technical leadership role offering the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging and impactful customer projects using the Azure platform, while contributing directly to the evolution of core Azure services. You will help shape an observability-focused Azure service approaching General Availability, working across product engineering, customer environments, and production operations to improve how cloud workloads are designed, monitored, and operated at scale.
Unlike a traditional engineering management role focused primarily on people leadership and organizational execution, this position requires meaningful, ongoing hands-on engineering contributions. You will actively participate in software design and development, tackle complex technical challenges, contribute to product features and fixes, and work directly with customers to solve real-world engineering problems. You will also lead by example through code reviews, architectural guidance, technical decision-making, and direct involvement in critical engineering initiatives.
Alongside these individual contributions, you will manage and develop a geographically distributed engineering pod across North America. This includes establishing technical direction, building engineering capability, setting clear priorities, coaching engineers, managing delivery, and creating an environment that enables high-quality engineering and customer impact. You will balance near-term customer needs with long-term product investments, ensuring that insights from the field translate into meaningful improvements to Azure services.
You will also play a key role in production reliability and service operations, including on-call participation, incident investigation, and driving engineering improvements that strengthen service resilience and operational excellence.
This is an opportunity to operate at the intersection of engineering leadership, product innovation, and customer experience: building software, solving complex customer problems, and growing a high-performing engineering team while directly influencing the evolution of Azure.
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
Customer Innovation Engineering is a highly technical team that operates globally and is responsible for:
Driving engineering impact with strategic Azure customers
Working directly with some of Microsoft’s most strategic customers to design, build, and optimize production-grade applications on Azure, reducing technical debt and enabling scalable architectures.
Building and evolving an observability-focused service
Contributing to the design, development, and continuous improvement of a new platform capability that enhances monitoring, diagnostics, and operational visibility for cloud workloads.
Owning production reliability and operations
Supporting live production environments through on-call participation, incident investigation, and and implementing engineering improvements that enhance reliability and performance.
Creating reusable engineering assets
Developing technical assets, tools, guidance, and reference implementations that enable repeatable customer success at scale and accelerate Azure adoption.
Influencing Azure platform engineering
Collaborating with other product teams to represent real-world customer experience and drive improvements across other Azure services.
Strengthening technical capability across MCAPS-Core
Developing and supporting technical teams to deepen engineering expertise and delivery quality across the field organization.
Leading and developing the engineering team
Providing technical direction, coaching, and people leadership to build a high-performing team, while balancing hands-on engineering contributions with delivery and talent development.
Driving engineering strategy and execution
Setting priorities, aligning engineering efforts with business goals, and leading cross-team initiatives to deliver customer impact and long-term technical value.
Qualifications
Required/minimum 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.
Other requirement
- Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s job duties.
- 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.
Additional or 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.
- 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.
- Proficient hands-on engineering experience with one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
- Experience designing and delivering production-grade software, with a track record of making 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, deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases, and production operations.
- Experience with containerized workloads and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
- Proficient communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across distributed teams and engage directly with customers and senior technical stakeholders.
- 3+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects
- Experience in a player-coach engineering leadership role that combines meaningful hands-on development with people management and technical direction.
- Experience building and operating cloud services at scale, particularly within observability, monitoring, diagnostics, or reliability engineering.
- Experience with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), incident management, on-call operations, and improving the reliability of production systems.
- 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.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering, agentic systems, and emerging approaches to cloud operations and observability.
- Experience leading geographically distributed engineering teams across multiple locations and time zones.
- A strong commitment to continuous learning, technical curiosity, and staying current with Azure innovations and broader trends in cloud architecture, distributed systems, and AI.
Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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.