Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Bengaluru, KA, IN · Software Engineering

Principal Engineering Manager to lead a team building an AI-based, agentic solution for automating and orchestrating the onboarding and maintainability of partner offerings within Azure. The role involves setting technical vision, owning end-to-end strategy, and ensuring high standards for agentic safety, evaluation, and reliability. It also involves managing a team that operates mission-critical systems, collaborates across organizations, and focuses on reducing friction and improving reliability for Azure's partner ecosystem.

What you'd actually do

  1. Collaborating with engineering teams, product management, partners, and engineering leadership to align on and understand the problems we want to solve across our ISV partners and build strategy, lead adoption for agentic solution.
  2. Unblocking obstacles for your team members as they solve Azure Native Integrations' most critical problems, often via real-time conversations in Teams and Slack and with asynchronous communication in GitHub Issues, PRs, Discussions, and Projects
  3. Communicating effectively to stakeholders and leadership of progress and risks
  4. Coordinating work within the team and stakeholders, building relationships, and identifying opportunities and areas of improvement
  5. Ensuring the team produces good architectural design outcomes, secure and resilient systems, and quality code—including a high bar for agentic safety, evaluation, and reliability across services

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years' experience in software engineering, computer science, or related technical discipline.
  • Proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java.
  • 3+ years' experience leading engineering teams delivering complex cloud, platform, integration, or service systems.
  • Experience setting technical direction and driving execution across multiple engineers or teams in a complex cross-functional environment.
  • Proven ability to hire, coach, and develop engineers while maintaining high standards for technical quality and operational excellence.
  • Proven ability to partner across organizations, align stakeholders, and improve reliability, delivery predictability, and engineering effectiveness for business-critical systems.
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field.

Nice to have

  • Experience leading or owning large-scale cloud platform, control-plane, marketplace, or partner/ISV integration systems, with a focus on reliability, performance, and developer experience.
  • Hands-on experience or strong working knowledge of applied AI—LLMs, agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, RAG, tool/function calling, guardrails, and AI evaluation/quality practices.
  • Proven ability to run operationally critical platforms, including incident response, on-call leadership, observability, and cross-org escalation.
  • Track record of cross-team collaboration and influence, working with partner owners and platform teams to drive best practices and paved paths.
  • Familiarity with provisioning, billing, identity, or storage integration challenges at scale, including diagnosing and reducing operational failures.
  • Experienced people manager able to balance execution, operational stability, and long-term platform investment in complex, high-change environments.
  • Experience driving strategy and execution across multiple dependent engineering teams.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Passion for fostering good engineering practices and processes.
  • Experience recruiting and retaining healthy teams, managing performance, and calibrating expectations.
  • Experience working remotely and collaborating with distributed teams.

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-based, agentic solution
  • agentic safety, evaluation, and reliability
  • agentic solution

Other signals

  • leading a team responsible for foundational platform and services
  • AI-based, agentic solution that automates and orchestrates onboarding and maintainability
  • reducing onboarding friction, improving service reliability, responding to incidents, and evolving our AI-driven platforms
  • high bar for agentic safety, evaluation, and reliability across services