Principal Software Engineering Manager

Overview
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. You will guide 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.

In this role, you will shape both the technical direction and engineering culture of the team, helping people grow while driving architectural investments that position PowerPoint Live and Microsoft 365 for long-term success.
You will be part of a collaborative engineering group based in Vancouver, BC, partnering closely with teams in Redmond, WA, Mountain View, CA, and other global locations. You will lead the team into a new agentic coding approach, using AI-assisted development tools aggressively across multiple large codebases to diagnose and solve complex reliability issues and accelerate high-quality delivery. You will be an agent of change, discarding outdated processes when necessary and inventing faster, more effective engineering workflows and tools that raise the bar for how the team delivers.
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.

Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay…