Software Engineering Manager

Overview: Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators collaborate to envision what can be and take their careers further. This role offers possibilities, innovation, and openness in a cloud-enabled world.

The Learning Product Team Mission

The Learning Product Team within Worldwide Learning (WWL) aims to develop world-class, innovative Skilling Products & Experiences. These inspire customers, partners, MCAPS sellers, and future generations to achieve more by skilling, upskilling, and reskilling, reaching over 100 million learners. Our culture emphasizes a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams to bring their best daily, creating life-changing innovations globally.

The Role

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead an engineering crew and serve as a technical authority. You will spearhead the development, design, and implementation of sophisticated software solutions that enhance Skilling and Learning for our global learners. This aligns with WWL's strategic goals to reach 100M+ learners, helping "Ignite our Base" and "Lead with Learning."

The Learn Product Engineering crew is rebranding and reimagining Skilling Platforms for commercial, consumer, and next-generation learners through conversational and engaging experiences, leveraging the agentic AI framework. We envision a world where current and future workforces can easily navigate professional career aspirations by discovering personalized skilling content.

Your expertise will be instrumental in driving the development of next-generation technologies, system architecture, and delivering robust, scalable solutions. We are seeking an energetic, customer-obsessed lead to develop, release, and maintain business-critical services crucial for Microsoft and WWL's success.

You will collaborate with teams across Microsoft, MCAPS, and WWL to simplify, extend, and scale our skilling platforms. This role offers the opportunity to drive impact across MCAPS and leverage technologies like GenAI, AOAI, Business Applications, Power Platform, and Azure, fundamental in building modern microservices-based solutions.

You are also expected to learn and adopt relevant new technologies, tools, methods, and processes from Microsoft and the industry, and develop team talent to consume these technologies in business applications.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and organization to achieve more. We foster a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to achieve shared goals, building a culture of inclusion based on respect, integrity, and accountability.

Responsibilities

Coding

• Drive high-quality code through technical documentation, code reviews, and engineering excellence.
• Optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability.
• Lead sprint development, scaling to customer requirements, and applying best practices for performance expectations.
• Guide teams on producing extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code adhering to design specifications.
• Model best practices of software engineering, coach team members in growth mindset and career development, and contribute hands-on to architecture and implementation.
• Lead efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while accounting for trade-offs.
• Identify best practices and coding patterns, providing deep expertise on coding and validation strategy.
• Define or reuse quality metrics, best practices, and coding patterns to ensure testable code.
• Lead by example in best code-writing practices (e.g., leveraging GenAI, source code organization, naming conventions).
• Lead team on identifying and anticipating blockers, escalating them, communicating impacts, and implementing strategies to address them.

Reliability and Supportability

• Integrate, design, and review logging and instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior (performance, reliability, availability, utility, safety, security).
• Lead team on leveraging telemetry feedback to improve monitoring designs.
• Ensure solutions are scalable, financially responsible, and meet capture/storage guidelines.
• Guide team and lead efforts to classify and analyze complex data on system metrics.

People Management

• Practice Microsoft's leadership principles: Coach, define team objectives, enable success, and help the team adapt and learn.
• Attract and build a strong engineering team, mentoring and growing junior developers.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C#, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Preferred:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience with C#, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years people management experience.
• 4+ years of experience in Distributed Systems and coaching junior staff.
• 8+ years of experience in system software development, focusing on software development, system/solution architecture, and system-level software design principles.
• 8+ years of engineering experience building and deploying products or services.
• 2+ years of experience with GenAI, Azure Open AI, Power Platform, and D365.
• Entrepreneurial sense of ownership, ability to take initiative, and operate autonomously.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.

Key skills/competency

• Software Engineering
• People Management
• System Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• Coding (C#, JavaScript, Python)
• Generative AI (GenAI)
• Azure Open AI (AOAI)
• Power Platform
• Microservices
• Technical Leadership