Principal Software Engineer Manager

Team Overview

The Microsoft 365 Release & Delivery Experiences (RDX) team ensures that the world's largest software franchises - including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive - are widely adopted, secure, and continuously updated with the latest innovations to over a billion users worldwide.

We build experiential service platforms that help customers acquire Microsoft 365 Apps and stay current through predictable, safe and intelligent update experiences. Our investments emphasize security, compliance and privacy, while leveraging Azurebased microservices to modernize IT Admin capabilities for enterprise serviceability.

Through missioncritical platforms such as Customer Platform Services (CPS) and the Microsoft Application Services Platform (MASP), RDX delivers endtoend deployment experiences that enable:

• Update management for Microsoft 365 Apps.
• Enterprise policy management.
• Predictable Monthly Enterprise Channel delivery.
• Complianceaware change rollout.
• Safe onboarding of application changes across environments.

Our platforms power highvalue customerfacing scenarios that allow IT Administrators to manage updates confidently across diverse enterprise environments - improving release predictability while preserving customer trust. Design and implementation across RDX emphasizes deep understanding of customer experience, telemetrydriven deployment intelligence, and continuous improvement informed by realworld usage signals and feedback. We partner across Office application teams and platform engineering groups to deliver fullstack deployment and release

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the architecture, delivery and livesite excellence of RDX deployment services supporting CPS and MASP platforms.

This role is responsible for enabling safe, compliant and datadriven deployment of Microsoft 365 client updates across global enterprise environments by building and operating largescale distributed services that power release orchestration, rollout governance and automated recovery. You will work closely with Office application teams and partner platform organizations to ensure changes are introduced through staged, observable and reversible deployment workflows that minimize regressions and reduce customervisible impact.

Your team will build and operate service infrastructure that:

• Enables IT Admin update and policy management experiences.
• Supports enterprise deployment governance scenarios.
• Leverages telemetry and customer feedback to validate release health.
• Automates mitigation and remediation of production regressions.
• Improves reliability and performance of Monthly Enterprise Channel delivery.

This role requires solid experience in building and operating largescale distributed services, deep understanding of production deployment safety, and the ability to influence engineering outcomes across multiple product groups.

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.

Platform & Services Ownership

• Own CPS and MASP service architecture supporting Office client release and deployment workflows.
• Drive reliability, scalability and availability of deployment services used across M365 app teams.
• Enable SafetoChange release infrastructure through staged rollouts and automated safeguards.
• Deliver automationfirst rollback and remediation capabilities to minimize customer impact.

DataDriven Deployment Intelligence

• Define telemetry pipelines and data signals used for release gating, validation and rollback.
• Leverage usage, reliability and performance data to inform deployment decisions.
• Enable deployment observability across client environments and tenant segments.
• Build predictive deployment health signals to proactively detect regressions.

Release Predictability & Customer Trust

• Partner with Office Product teams to onboard changes safely through CPS/MASP.
• Reduce customer escalations and regressions through servicebased deployment controls.
• Improve release reliability across Monthly Enterprise Channel delivery.
• Establish measurable deployment quality and recovery SLAs.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead and grow a team responsible for Tier0 deployment services.
• Coach engineers in distributed systems design, production resiliency and livesite excellence.
• Drive crossorg collaboration across Office apps, platform engineering and compliance teams.
• Influence engineering strategy across RDX and Office release ecosystem.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 12+ years of experience building and operating production software or services.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience.
• Experience with largescale distributed systems and service architecture.
• Experience in deployment safety, reliability engineering or release governance platforms preferred.
• Experience working with data pipelines, experimentation systems or telemetry platforms.
• Experience building or operating largescale distributed deployment or release orchestration platforms used by multiple product teams.
• Experience running production cloud services with accountability for availability, reliability and livesite health (SLO/SLA ownership).
• Experience designing or operating safe deployment systems such as staged rollouts, experimentation frameworks, flighting or progressive exposure pipelines.
• Familiarity with clientservice deployment workflows or enterprise update delivery models at scale.
• Experience with telemetry pipelines, experimentation platforms, health monitoring systems or deployment validation signals.
• Demonstrated ability to use production data signals (reliability, performance, usage) to drive release gating or automated rollback decisions.
• Experience developing automated mitigation, remediation or recovery systems to minimize customervisible impact from regressions.
• Experience onboarding partner engineering teams onto shared infrastructure or platform services.
• Familiarity with complianceaware change management, privacysensitive data collection or enterprise deployment governance models.
• Experience partnering across multiple engineering organizations to drive adoption of shared platform capabilities.
• Background in reliability engineering, deployment safety engineering or change management platforms in enterprise environments.
• Experience improving production outcomes such as reduced customer escalations, lower regression rates, improved release predictability or faster recovery times.

Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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

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.