Principal Software Engineering Manager

Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

As a Principal Software Engineering Manager on the PowerPoint Live team, you will lead a high-impact team that is redefining how millions of people present and collaborate within Microsoft Teams. This role involves guiding engineers in building and evolving PowerPoint Live fundamentals such as performance, reliability, scalability, and security, while also delivering new Copilot-powered experiences that transform real-time collaboration and presentation workflows.

You will shape both the technical direction and engineering culture of the team, fostering growth and driving architectural investments for long-term success. Based in Vancouver, BC, you will partner closely with global teams and lead the adoption of an agentic coding approach, leveraging AI-assisted development tools to diagnose complex reliability issues and accelerate high-quality delivery. You will innovate engineering workflows and tools, discarding outdated processes to enhance team efficiency.

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

• Guides partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements within and across teams.
• Guides teams and leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Leads teams in prioritizing and driving large-scale optimization, debugging, and refactoring of critical systems to improve performance, maintainability, and engineering effectiveness, maximizing return on investment across multiple codebases.
• Guides team to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items in coordination with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers).
• Guides the team and serves as the expert Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), owning on-call quality and practices, monitoring systems for degradation, downtime, or interruptions, and driving durable, architectural fixes based on incidents and reliability insights.
• Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and holds accountability for products that do not meet expectations.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline 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.
• 6+ years of people management experience.

Other Requirements:

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 4+ years people management experience.
• Bachelor'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 Master'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.
• Hands on experience in LLM-based features and optimizations.

Key skills/competency

• Software Engineering Management
• PowerPoint Live
• Microsoft Teams Integration
• Performance Optimization
• Reliability Engineering
• Scalability
• AI-assisted Development
• Copilot Integration
• Architectural Design
• People Leadership