Principal Software Engineering Manager (Developer Platform)

Quick Facts

• Role: Principal Software Engineering Manager
• Focus: Evolving Sandbox, a secure isolated cloud environment for agentic workloads on GitHub
• Goal: Build developer platform capabilities that enable safe, policy-controlled tool execution and code changes

Description

Lead the engineering team responsible for the continued evolution of Sandbox, enabling AI agents to run tools and execute commands in secure, isolated cloud environments. Drive technical strategy and execution in partnership with product and engineering teams to shape the future of cloud-based development. Emphasize reliability, security, experimentation, telemetry-driven iteration, and engineering excellence through automation and standardization.

Responsibilities

• Drive the engineering roadmap aligned to product goals; prioritize investments and adopt new technologies
• Coordinate cross-team collaboration; resolve dependencies and technical/organizational challenges
• Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing engineering team
• Guide architecture and technical decisions balancing scalability, security, reliability, maintainability, and delivery velocity
• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development for rapid iteration and data-informed decisions
• Improve engineering excellence via automation, tooling, testing, and standardization across development, deployment, and operations
• Own operational excellence: SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, and post-incident learning

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in C/C++/C#/Java/JavaScript/Python (or equivalent experience)
• Experience designing, building, or operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-based platforms
• Experience with multi-tenant compute platforms, containers, virtual machines, microVMs, and workload orchestration
• Experience with security and workload isolation, including safe execution of untrusted code, network isolation, secrets management, and defense-in-depth
• Experience building platforms that support AI and agentic workloads, including dynamic execution environments and tool use
• Experience leading cross-functional initiatives with product, security, and engineering teams to deliver platform capabilities
• Ability to meet Microsoft cloud security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check at hire/transfer and every two years

Benefits

• Base pay range (U.S.): USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year
• Base pay range (San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metro): USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year
• Eligible for benefits and other compensation (details provided by Microsoft compensation page)