Principal Software Engineering Manager

What we do:

The Employee Self-Service (ESS) product is an emerging and cornerstone initiative within Microsoft’s Copilot ecosystem, designed to streamline and personalize employee interactions across HR, IT, and facilities domains. ESS empowers customers to quickly create conversational AI agents that integrates with enterprise systems to deliver accurate, context-aware responses and automate routine tasks.

Our Team:

We are a geo-distributed team of engineers in Redmond WA and India, with deep development partnerships with the Microsoft Copilot Studio team, Microsoft AI team and Bizchat team. We partner closely with a talented and senior set of Product Managers, Technical Program Managers, designers, and researchers. We’re a new and emerging product. Both the competition and technology are evolving rapidly, and we’re looking for individuals that current on AI technologies, thrive in ambiguity, learns quickly, curious, and capable of solving problems across multiple code stacks.

This role is based at the Redmond campus, with 3 days per week work on-site and 2 days per week work from home. 

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years experience designing, building, and managing high-scale full-stack systems including authentication, microservices, distributed systems, data and analytics workloads, and AI training and inferencing services.
• 6+ years experience managing geo-distributed engineering teams.
• Experienced with AI, cloud-based architectural patterns and best practices.

Software Engineering M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until August 28, 2025.

#DPG

• Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on extensibility for employee self-service scenarios.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap aligned with organizational goals and cross-functional priorities.

Cross-Team Collaboration:

• You will coordinate and partner across product teams, develop and support key extensibility features in Microsoft AI products – Microsoft Copilot Studio and Bizchat.
  
  
• You will collaborate with internal and customer HR, IT, and Facilities stakeholders to understand business needs and translate them into technical solutions.

AI Agent Enablement and Platform Extensibility:

• Architect and implement extensibility features that allow AI agents to interact with enterprise systems (e.g., HRIS, ITSM, Facilities platforms).
• Own the delivery of key extensibility features such as agent publishing, multi-agent architecture improvements, MCP and connectors, and conversational workflow customization.
• Ensure compatibility with OpenAPI standards and Microsoft’s AI orchestration models.

Drive operational excellence:

• Identify and drive performance, scalability, and reliability improvements across the ESS platform.
• Establish engineering best practices, including CI/CD, telemetry, and quality assurance.