Principal Software Engineering Manager

Job description

As a Principal Group Engineer Manager on the Windows Store team, you will: Lead and grow a solid engineering team. Hire, coach, mentor, and develop engineers while creating a culture of ownership, inclusion, learning, and engineering excellence. Provide technical leadership. Work with engineers to make sound architecture and design decisions and build systems that are scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and performant. Own outcomes end to end. Translate product and business goals into engineering plans and drive execution from design through implementation, experimentation, rollout, and operation. Champion the customer and developer experience. Use customer feedback, developer feedback, product signals, and engineering data to identify problems and continuously improve the Store. Drive engineering fundamentals. Build a culture where security, privacy, accessibility, quality, performance, telemetry, reliability, and operational excellence are part of how products are engineered from the beginning. Operate what you build. Establish solid service-health practices, telemetry, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement. Lead through ambiguity. Bring structure to complex problems, make thoughtful tradeoffs, establish clear priorities, and help the team move from ideas to measurable outcomes. Partner across organizational boundaries. Work closely with Product Management, Design, Data Science, partner engineering teams, and other Windows organizations to align architecture, dependencies, and execution. Embrace AI-native engineering. Help the team use AI effectively throughout the engineering lifecycle and explore how AI and agents can create new value for Windows customers and developers. Create clarity and energy. Connect the team's engineering work to the broader Windows and Store mission so engineers understand not just what we are building, but why it matters. Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python. OR equivalent experience. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field and significant software engineering experience, or equivalent experience. Experience designing, developing, and shipping production software. Experience leading or managing software engineers and helping engineers grow in their careers. Solid understanding of software architecture, engineering fundamentals, testing, debugging, performance, and operational excellence. Demonstrated ability to lead complex engineering projects involving multiple teams and dependencies. Solid written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly. Track record of working effectively across engineering, product, and other disciplines. Experience building large-scale cloud services, consumer applications, Windows applications, developer platforms, or commerce/distribution systems. Experience with Windows development technologies such as C++, C#. Experience with Azure and building highly available distributed services. Experience operating large-scale production systems, including telemetry, live-site management, incident response, and reliability engineering. Experience working with developer ecosystems, app distribution, marketplaces, or developer-facing platforms. Experience applying generative AI, LLMs, agents, or AI-assisted engineering techniques to real products or engineering workflows. A solid product mindset and demonstrated ability to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.