Overview
Microsoft Substrate is the foundational cloud platform that powers many of Microsoft’s most critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot, providing shared infrastructure, identity, messaging, storage, and service-to-service capabilities used across Microsoft 365 and related cloud offerings. Substrate services operate at global scale and are designed to deliver high availability, reliability, and security for some of the world’s most demanding workloads.
We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for building and operating Substrate services in highly regulated environments. In these environments, success depends not only on operational excellence, but also on strong software engineering fundamentals—clean, maintainable code; sound design decisions; robust telemetry; and disciplined engineering lifecycle practices that make systems reliable by design.
This role requires deep appreciation for software engineering as a reliability lever. You will lead teams that write and maintain production code, build automation and self-healing systems, and partner closely with feature engineering teams to ensure reliability, diagnosability, security, and compliance are embedded early in design and sustained throughout the service lifecycle. As a Principal-level manager, you will scale impact through others—developing senior and principal engineers, shaping reliability and engineering strategy, and influencing how Substrate services are designed, implemented, and operated across organizational boundaries.
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 a team of Site Reliability Engineer ICs, providing clear expectations, regular coaching, and career guidance across senior and principal levels. Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and inclusion.
- Own the operational health and reliability posture of Substrate services running in regulated environments, ensuring strong availability, incident readiness, and recovery practices.
- Drive change and influence across the org as you establish and drive SLOs, SLIs, and operational metrics, using data and learning loops to continuously improve reliability, diagnosability, and customer experience.
- Lead effective incident management and post-incident reviews, emphasizing systemic fixes, automation, and long-term resilience rather than short-term remediation.
- Serve as an actively engaged on-call engineer (OCE) and participate in an on-call rotation, leading incident response for Substrate services in regulated environments, providing hands-on leadership during incidents, and driving high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable engineering improvements.
- Own reliability, resilience, and disaster recovery, including driving and coordinating DR and game day exercises, validating recovery objectives, and ensuring operational playbooks and restore procedures remain current, effective, and auditable.
- Drive engineering led operational excellence at scale, leveraging strong software engineering practices, automation, and AI assisted techniques to reduce operational toil, improve diagnosability, and raise overall service and OCE health in partnership with infrastructure and service teams.
- Partner with engineering and product teams to embed reliability, security, and compliance considerations early in service design, architecture, and deployment decisions.
- Influence technical and operational strategy beyond your immediate team, particularly for cross‑cutting reliability and compliance challenges that span multiple services or organizations.
- Represent your team’s work clearly to leadership and partners, articulating risks, trade‑offs, and progress in regulated environments with precision and credibility.
- Build strong cross-functional relationships with security, compliance, infrastructure, and operations teams to deliver durable, compliant, and auditable reliability outcomes. ‑functional relationships with security, compliance, infrastructure, and operations teams to deliver
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.
**Other Requirements: **
Security Clearance Requirements
Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings:
This role requires access to Microsoft Government cloud environments, including GCC Moderate (GCCM), GCC High (GCCH), and Department of Defense (DoD) environments. As a result, the successful candidate must be able to obtain and maintain the appropriate background investigations and customer screenings required for access to these environments.
- For access to GCCH and DoD environments, this role requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorably adjudicated Tier 3 (T3) background investigation.
- For access to GCCM environments, this role requires the ability to meet Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) eligibility requirements.
For manager-level roles, a Tier 5 (T5) background investigation is preferred, as certain approval authorities and operational responsibilities require this level of screening.
Candidates may be considered without currently holding these background investigations, provided they are eligible for and able to successfully obtain them. Candidates may begin work while required background investigations are in progress; however, failure to obtain or maintain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
In addition, this position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
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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.
3+ years people management experience
Experience operating or supporting services in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.
Site Reliability 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.**