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Microsoft Teams is a mission critical collaboration platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The Teams Core organization builds the foundational services and platforms that enable Teams’ reliability, scale, performance, security, privacy, and extensibility. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer Manager for the Modern Triage Services team to lead an engineering team building core backend systems, distributed services, and platform capabilities that power Teams’ feeds & notifications every day. You’ll set technical direction, raise the engineering bar, and deliver platform improvements that measurably improve availability, latency, security posture, and developer productivity across the Teams ecosystem. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with people leadership and cross-org influence. You’ll operate with high ownership in a fast-moving environment while delivering services that run at global scale.
Job Responsibility:
Technical Leadership & Architecture: Own the architecture and evolution of core Teams services, building highly available, low-latency distributed systems
Lead design reviews and set standards for reliability, scalability, security, privacy, and performance (SLAs, threat modeling, capacity planning, and performance budgets)
Identify and mitigate systemic technical risks
drive simplification to reduce operational load and improve platform sustainability
Stay hands-on where it matters—deep dives, debugging, and prototypes—while empowering teams to execute independently
Execution & Delivery: Be accountable for shipping core platform capabilities that support millions of concurrent users with high availability and low latency
Drive predictable execution using agile practices, solid program management, and data-driven prioritization (quality, cost, and customer impact)
Own live-site excellence: SLAs, alerts, incident response, post-incident learning, and automation to prevent recurrence
Balance feature delivery with investments in platform robustness, scalability, and engineering efficiency
People & Organization Leadership: Lead, hire, mentor, and grow a team of software engineers
set clear expectations and career paths
Build inclusive, high-performing teams with solid ownership, psychological safety, and a bias for engineering excellence
Coach senior engineers and tech leads on execution, technical decision-making, and delivery excellence
Foster a culture of collaboration, quality, innovation and customer focus aligned with Microsoft values
Make AI a first-class production function
Cross-Org Influence & Strategy: Partner closely with Product Management, Security, Privacy, Client, and Infrastructure teams to deliver end-to-end experiences
Influence technical and organizational decisions beyond your immediate team by building alignment, making trade-offs explicit, and communicating clearly with senior leaders
Drive cross-team initiatives that improve platform velocity, resilience, and developer productivity (tooling, CI/CD, and operational automation)
Define and deliver a multi-quarter Teams Core technical roadmap, balancing reliability work, modernization, and feature enablement
Requirements:
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
12+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale services, including distributed systems
12+ years leading engineering teams, with solid hiring, coaching, and delivery outcomes
Proven track record delivering complex backend/platform capabilities in areas such as identity/auth, messaging, media, data platforms, networking, or developer platforms
Solid expertise in system design, architecture, and cloud-scale engineering (multi-region deployment, resiliency patterns, and observability)
Technical depth in modern backend development (for example: C#, Java, C++, Go), distributed data stores, messaging, and cloud platforms (for example: Azure/AWS/GCP)
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
Nice to have:
Experience leading platform, infrastructure, or foundational services in a large-scale product organization
Deep knowledge of distributed systems and SRE practices (SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on call health, and operational automation)
Demonstrated ability to drive cross-org technical alignment and influence without authority
Solid product mindset—connect platform investments to customer outcomes (quality, performance) and business impact (cost, agility)