Overview
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.
Why This Role
- Lead platform work that directly improves Teams reliability and performance for users worldwide.
- Own high leverage architectural decisions across distributed services, data stores, networking, and service to service APIs.
- Build and mentor a solid senior engineering bench and shape the team’s engineering culture.
- Partner broadly across Product, Security/Privacy, Infrastructure, and Client teams to land end to end solutions.
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
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 livesite 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.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications:
- 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).
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:
- 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).
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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.
