Overview
The Principal SRE leads curial initiatives in the team responsible for durable, high‑quality handling of high severity, customer impacting, incidents across Microsoft M365 Substrate Core services. As our systems continue to expand in scope and complexity, this role ensures incidents are handled consistently, predictably, and with clear ownership, minimizing customer impact while accelerating recovery and organizational learning.
This role combines leadership in the reliability domain, incident command, and operational governance, working in close partnership with Incident Managers (IMs), Service Owners, and executive stakeholders. You will set standards for how Substrate responds to its most severe outages and drive the evolution of incident handling and escalation practices across all production rings and public/sovereign clouds.
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
- Own execution quality for Substrate high severity incidents, ensuring clear command, decisive leadership, and forward momentum during high‑impact events.
- Act as the senior incident leader or sponsor for long‑running, high‑stakes, or cross‑service incidents, ensuring alignment on impact, risk, and recovery priorities.
- Partner closely with Incident Managers, Subject Matter Experts, and service leaders to ensure effective diagnosis, escalation, and mitigation when ownership is unclear or action is blocked
- Ensure high‑quality post‑incident reviews and drive accountability for repair items that reduce recurrence and systemic risk. Ensure consistent application of severity and priority models, outage declaration criteria, and executive escalation paths.
- Coach and help develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers serving as incident responders.
- Build a culture of calm execution, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning during and after incidents.
- Help hire and grow senior talent capable of operating as trusted leaders in high‑pressure, executive‑visible situations.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and executives on live‑site risk, readiness, and incident response maturity.
- Communicate clearly and credibly with senior leadership during customer‑impacting events.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience.
Proven experience leading teams through high‑severity production incidents in large, distributed systems.
Strong understanding of incident management, reliability engineering, and live‑site operations at scale.
Ability to drive clarity, accountability, and results in ambiguous, time‑critical situations.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.
- 7+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
- Experience building or scaling incident response programs at organizational or enterprise scope.
- Background in SRE, production engineering, or platform reliability roles.
- Track record of reducing customer impact through improved incident handling, tooling, or prevention.
- Experience operating in follow‑the‑sun or globally distributed incident response models.
#R&R #Foundation #Substrate
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.**