Overview
Commercial Engineering & AI (CEAI) partners closely with stakeholders to accelerate the transformation of Microsoft’s commercial business into a frontier organization. We bring together AI-native engineering, modern platforms, and deep commercial insight to reimagine how work gets done — at scale and with impact. Our mission is to unlock new ways of operating through intelligent systems while creating the conditions for our teams to do the most meaningful work of their careers. If you’re excited to build, experiment, and shape the future of commercial execution with AI at the core, we invite you to apply.
Within CEAI, the Sales Planning & Commercial Incentives (SPCI) team turns Microsoft’s revenue strategy into seller reality. SPCI owns the engineering systems that power the planning-to-payout lifecycle — the platforms, tools, and user experiences that equip every Microsoft seller with the right coverage, clear targets, and timely, accurate compensation. As a Principal Group Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a multi-team engineering organization transforming the sales resource planning space: the systems that model territory, segmentation, capacity, and assignments, and translate revenue strategy into a clear executional model. You will set technical direction and guide architecture across your charter, build and grow a high-performing organization of engineering leaders, and partner across product, business, and corporate functions to ship a composable, AI-native platform that sellers and planners trust.
Responsibilities
Engineering Leadership & Talent Development — Lead and nurture a multi-team engineering organization. Set clear performance expectations, manage performance, and build strong succession pipelines. Foster an inclusive and trust culture, grow talent, and establish the operating rhythms that keep teams aligned, accountable, and shipping.
Technical Vision & Architecture — Define the modular core primitives and the contract-driven, composable architecture that lets teams build independently at the edge while the core stays coherent, and drive architectural decisions that balance velocity, reliability, privacy, and extensibility.
AI-Native Engineering — Cultivate an AI-native engineering culture — both in what you build (agentic, intelligent planning experiences) and how you build it (AI-accelerated design, development, testing, and operations). Stay ahead of AI tooling trends, raise the bar on AI fluency across your teams, and make AI leverage a durable, data-backed source of productivity in how the organization works.
Engineering Fundamentals & Operational Excellence — Engineering fundamentals: design quality, code health, security, privacy, performance, reliability, and cost/COGS discipline. Own service reliability and live-site health, the timeliness and accuracy of planning cycles, and end-to-end ownership from design through operations — investing in the engineering systems, CI/CD, observability, and incident management that make quality and velocity compounding.
Delivery & Execution — Turn strategy into a predictable delivery cadence across teams. Balance long-term platform investment with near-term commitments; manage dependencies, risk, and trade-offs; and ship durable outcomes on time — especially through the demanding rhythm of annual planning transitions.
Cross-Functional Influence — Partner with product management, data science, design, sales operations, finance, and HR to align technical direction with business goals. Influence without authority and unify partners around a clear architecture, plan, and set of trade-offs.
Communication & Data-Informed Decisions — Communicate technical strategy, progress, and risk to senior executives with clarity and data-driven narratives. Define and monitor the metrics that prove the system is transforming: timeliness and accuracy of planning and compensation, platform reliability, engineering velocity and quality, user trust, and business agility.
Qualifications
Required/minimum qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 18+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications
6+ years of people management experience leading software engineering teams, preferably experience managing managers, with a track record of leading and growing teams.
Experience leading teams that span, partner, and vendor resources toward shared outcomes.
Technical and engineering leadership with the experience to define architecture, drive execution strategy, and deliver large-scale distributed platforms and services with measurable business impact.
Experience building relationships with and driving consensus among senior executives and cross-functional stakeholders in large or strategic organizations, and of managing stakeholder relationships to reach agreement on solutions.
Experience driving decisions collaboratively, resolve conflicts, and ensure follow-through, with written and verbal communication and presentation skills across all levels of management and audience sizes.
Experience building AI-native, agentic products and/or applying AI across the software development lifecycle with measurable productivity gains.
Experience building composable, contract-driven platforms at scale, with deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms (e.g., Azure), and data-intensive applications.
Experience in commercial systems, including incentives, sales planning, CRM, and/or marketplaces.
Experience scaling multi-team engineering organizations, e.g., as a Group Engineering Manager or Director of Engineering.
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.**