Principal Software Eng Mgr

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Hyderabad, TS, IN · Software Engineering

The Principal Software Engineering Manager will lead a team focused on AI-powered developer productivity tooling and agentic systems. This role involves managing engineers, setting team direction, fostering experimentation with AI approaches, and championing the use of AI in daily workflows. The manager will also be responsible for career development, cross-team partnerships, and recruiting.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead, grow, and retain a team of talented software engineers working on AI-powered developer productivity tooling.
  2. Partner with technical leads and principal engineers to set team direction, prioritize work, and ensure alignment with broader organizational and Microsoft goals.
  3. Drive clarity on team goals, project milestones, and success metrics — translating strategy into executable plans.
  4. Foster a culture of experimentation and resilience, where the team feels empowered to try novel AI approaches, learn from failures, and iterate quickly.
  5. Own the career development of your engineers — providing regular coaching, feedback, and growth opportunities.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's/Masters Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
  • 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • Proven experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
  • A solid software engineering background – You should be hands on with design and coding, able to engage deeply with technical decisions, review designs, and earn credibility with high-level engineers.
  • Track record of delivering software projects end-to-end: scoping, planning, shipping, and iterating
  • solid communication and collaboration skills
  • Expereince in production and livesite management for business-critical services, ensuring high availability, reliability, performance, and fast incident response.
  • Drive proactive monitoring, alerting, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvements to reduce customer and partner impact.

Nice to have

  • Personal experience using AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants
  • Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
  • Hands-on experience (as an IC or manager) building systems that leverage Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks.
  • Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
  • Ability to evaluate and form informed opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translate those insights into team strategy and best practices.
  • Background in developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or engineering systems at scale.

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-powered developer productivity tooling
  • agentic systems
  • AI developer tools
  • agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
  • Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks.
  • agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Other signals

  • AI-powered developer productivity tooling
  • agentic systems
  • AI developer tools