Overview
We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer Manager to lead Email Semantic Indexing that support Outlook search and Microsoft 365 Copilot, integrating Responsible AI practices and recommending improvements.
You will lead a team that makes it faster and safer to experiment with, and bring to production, new approaches to email semantic indexing. You will own the index lifecycle, and operational health, while improving freshness, completeness, performance, and cost efficiency. A central responsibility is enabling rapid, repeatable experimentation, proactively resolving cross-team dependencies and escalating constraints.
Partnering closely with product, relevance, and model teams, you will translate promising approaches into production-ready capabilities and use joint quality and cost evidence to guide decisions.
As a people leader, you will grow engineers, establish clear accountability, and foster an inclusive culture of technical excellence and continuous learning. You will champion disciplined AI-assisted development and embed security, privacy, reliability, and Responsible AI throughout the software development lifecycle.
Guides collaboration with stakeholders to confirm user requirements and leverages feedback channels for design improvements. Owns and leads architecture discussions, manages design documents, evaluates new technologies, and reviews complex designs. Guides teams in creating test strategies, incorporating security testing, and leveraging AI tools for test automation. Leads managing dependencies and collaborates across teams to align schedules and resolve conflicts. Guides development process, ensuring extensible, maintainable, and secure code using best practices. Acts as an expert in troubleshooting, applying least-access principles, and conducting incident retrospectives. Leads code reviews, ensuring adherence to best practices.
Drives project planning, anticipates future goals, and ensures compliance with security requirements. Guides experimentation, deployment, live site maintenance, and incident response, ensuring safe and efficient operations. Integrates telemetry to monitor system behavior and improves designs based on analysis. Guides development tool selection and continuous integration in production. Ensures compliance with security and regulatory standards, mentors on learning and development, and advocates for best practices and security-informed engineering. In addition, this role has people management responsibilities including driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance.
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
Lead and develop the team. Model Microsoft's leadership principles and foster an inclusive, accountable, learning-oriented culture. Coach engineers, support career growth, provide actionable feedback, and manage performance with clear expectations.
Set technical direction. Own architecture discussions and guide design decisions for email semantic indexing, including content processing, embedding generation, index updates, and integration with retrieval systems. Evaluate technologies and make thoughtful tradeoffs across quality, freshness, scalability, resiliency, and cost.
Deliver customer and business outcomes. Partner with product management and engineering stakeholders to clarify requirements, define success measures, and translate priorities into an executable roadmap. Lead planning, resource allocation, and dependency management, resolving cross-team issues to deliver end-to-end results.
Drive engineering excellence. Guide the team in building extensible, maintainable, secure, and high-performance software. Establish rigorous design and code reviews, comprehensive test strategies, security testing, and automation across development and CI/CD pipelines.
Own service health and operational readiness. Lead safe deployments, flighting, monitoring, incident response, and production debugging. Ensure clear live-site ownership, escalation paths, disaster recovery, and rollback plans. Use incident retrospectives to address root causes and prevent recurrence.
Improve quality through experimentation. Establish telemetry and evaluation practices to understand indexing behavior and downstream retrieval impact. Use feature flags, controlled experiments, and production signals to validate changes and guide investment.
Build security, privacy, and responsible AI into the platform. Apply least-access principles and ensure email content and derived indexes respect access controls and applicable data-handling requirements. Embed security monitoring, response readiness, AI safety, and compliance with privacy, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
Advance AI-assisted engineering. Lead disciplined adoption of AI tools for development, testing, debugging, and operational workflows. Measure their effectiveness, maintain human accountability for quality, and help the team continuously improve its engineering practices.
Qualifications
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.
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:
Master's degree AND 8+ years technical engineering experience
OR Bachelor's degree AND 12+ years experience.
4+ years of people management experience.
CAP #Copilot
Software Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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. (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html)
