Principal Engineering Manager, Minecraft

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Redmond, WA +1 · Software Engineering

Lead the Engineering Systems team for Minecraft Bedrock, owning build pipelines, CI/CD, test frameworks, and DevOps infrastructure. Drive system reliability, simplicity, and observability while building and developing a high-performing team.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead and develop the Engineering Systems team - recruit, coach, and retain top talent; set clear direction and priorities; foster a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous improvement.
  2. Own the reliability and performance of Minecraft's build and CI/CD systems - drive full observability (monitoring, telemetry, alerts), reduce system complexity, and hold the team accountable to KPIs including availability, MTTD (Mean Time to Detect), MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), build/test time, and failure rate.
  3. Architect engineering systems end-to-end - make decisions across GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, CMake, FastBuild, VCPKG, test frameworks, device provisioning, and release pipelines.
  4. Partner across the studio to unblock engineering teams - ensure developers can validate locally, merge to main with confidence, and ship continuously; drive early socialization of changes.
  5. Drive DevOps and SRE best practices - automate everything, work incrementally, detect issues quickly; establish and support engineering best practices covering simplicity, modularity, testability, and observability.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
  • 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python

Nice to have

  • Experience leading engineering systems, DevOps, or build/release infrastructure teams in a large-scale software environment.
  • Technical depth in CI/CD pipelines, build systems, test automation, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, CMake, YAML).
  • Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous, complex area and drive clarity - figuring out what needs to be done, educating others on what/why/how, and leading through implementation.
  • Track record of building and developing high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and managing performance.
  • Experience with game development or large C++ codebases and the unique build/test challenges they present.
  • Familiarity with DevOps/SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) metrics (DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics, availability, MTTD, MTTR) and a data-driven approach to improving developer productivity.
  • Experience with device provisioning, multi-platform testing (console, mobile, desktop, server), and managed test infrastructure.

What the JD emphasized

  • reliability
  • performance
  • observability
  • simplicity
  • testability