Principal Software Engineer Manager- CTJ- Poly (Reston)

Job ID: 200030926Posted: 2026-03-18Location: United States, Virginia, RestonSalary: USD $142,800 - $274,800 per yearEmployment type: Full-TimeWork site: 3 days / week in-officeRole type: People ManagerTravel: Less than 25%Profession: Software EngineeringDiscipline: Software EngineeringCompany: MicrosoftOverviewMicrosoft has an exciting opportunity for a Principal Software Engineer Manager to lead engineering teams responsible for developing, deploying, operating, and continuously improving Azure services within Microsoft Specialized Clouds. This role sits at the intersection of cloud platform engineering, live site operations, and regulated cloud delivery, supporting mission critical Azure products in environments.As a people manager and technical leader, this role owns end to end service accountability—from design and deployment through live site reliability, operational excellence, and customer impact. The manager will guide teams delivering capabilities across specialized cloud environments, ensuring service parity, reliability, and operational readiness while honoring unique regulatory constraints.This role requires strong collaboration across engineering, security, compliance, and operations partners to ensure Azure services are safely deployed, operated, and supported at scale. The manager is expected to drive operational rigor, reduce manual production touches through automation, and ensure clear ownership for incident response, change management, and compliance workflows.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.ResponsibilitiesAI-Native DevelopmentLeads team on the disciplined use of, and improving artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Guides team on proactively taking responsibility for the content of their AI-generated requirements, design documents, code, and other assets, and assisting other members of the team to do the same. Leads team on incorporating Responsible AI practices into the SDLC to ensure appropriate controls over AI-generated assets. Coaches team on applying SDLC and engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE framework, Engineering System Success Playbook [ESSP]) to guide improvements to processes and practices, especially those involving AI. Leads team on experimenting with AI tools and practices to improve their own capabilities, and providing recommendations on how to adopt them to others.CodingReviews debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and acts as an expert for others to proactively verify assumptions while developing code before issues occur across products in production. Conducts incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, and leads teams on implementing repair actions and identifying mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence. Tracks and attempts to minimize cost of debugging multiple scenarios. Leads team on proactively applying least-access principles, using logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and driving those practices.Coaches others to review product code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Leads team on bringing insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills. Conducts code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team. Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews, providing feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. Advocates for and ensures team uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process.Guides team within and across teams on producing extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise on the coding and validation strategy. Defines or reuses quality metrics, best practices, and coding patterns to ensure testable code. Leads by example in best code-writing practices (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions). Leads team on identifying and anticipating blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalating them, communicating how they will impact timelines, and leading efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them.DesignGuides team in creating clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code. Guides team on ensuring test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Leads adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite. Leads efforts to ensure the scalability and reliability of the test framework during design. Leads team on building testable code and considering testability during design for a set of solutions. Guides team on understanding the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applying them across the architecture as appropriate. Leads team on identifying and executing plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code for a set of solutions. Advocates for and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation.Guides teams on and leads identifying dependencies and incorporating them into the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. Leads the active identification of other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Demonstrates deep understanding of upstream and downstream interactions between systems and ensures security, compliance, performance, and reliability can be achieved across the entire stack. Coordinates and collaborates with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap. Enables communications and negotiates across teams to resolve conflicts among dependency ownership and required work. Drives agreements between dependent teams to align to the delivery schedule.Guides others on owning and leading efforts and discussions for architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Looks for opportunities to leverage and incorporate open-source, off-the-shelf components and/or preexisting, managed services as part of the design of products/architecture. Guides others on leading the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations and owns design decisions and oversees the less experienced team members. Guides others and writes design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Guides employees to consider, and leads efforts to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Guides employees on upholding Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Guides team on understanding the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through data analytics and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Leads team on reviewing complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.Engineering ExcellenceGuides team on leading the identification of requirements for, and the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Guides others to run code in simulated, or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products. Ensures a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CICD) infrastructure is in place that promotes developer and operational agility (e.g., low lead-time-to-change metrics).Identifies and acts as an expert in best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code that is based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product de