Principal Product Manager

Overview

The Microsoft 365 Core Platform team is hiring a Principal Product Manager for its Fleet & Capacity team, the group that puts the right infrastructure in the right places at the right time for every Microsoft 365 workload. The team plans, delivers, and operates the fleet behind Microsoft 365, and it directs billions of dollars in capacity investment each year. This is a broad role for a builder who wants to move across the charter and take on the biggest open problems rather than hold a single fixed area.

The work spans demand forecasting, capacity investment planning, platform and hardware strategy, supply and demand balancing, capacity delivery, live fleet operations, and decommissioning. AI growth is reshaping all of it. Demand is larger and less predictable than it has ever been, hardware choices carry more weight, and the cost of getting capacity wrong scales with the fleet. You will help the team decide where to invest, when to build, what to run it on, and how to keep the fleet healthy and efficient as it grows.

This is an AI-first product management role. You will use agents, automation, and AI-driven analysis alongside standard PM tools to read telemetry, model tradeoffs, prototype solutions, and reach decisions faster. You will translate hard technical and financial tradeoffs into terms leaders can act on, and you will help move the team toward AI-forward ways of working, including evaluation sets and agent-based workflows built into how the work gets done.

You will partner closely with engineering leaders, architects, data scientists, finance, and supply chain across Microsoft. The role carries broad visibility and influence, and it depends on strong product sense, technical depth, data fluency, and clear judgment under uncertainty.

This position is based in Redmond, Washington and requires the employee be in the office a minimum of 3 days per week.

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.

Responsibilities

• Shape the strategy for the capacity and fleet work that matters most across Microsoft 365, and turn that direction into a roadmap teams can execute.

• Take on high-impact problems across the charter, including capacity planning, supply and demand balancing, fleet health, platform transitions, and decommissioning, and drive them to a result.

• Use AI-driven analysis of demand signals, telemetry, and operational data to forecast more accurately, catch capacity and reliability issues early, and fix them at the root.

• Use agents, automation, and AI Ops to analyze data, coordinate work, and act on what you learn.

• Model capacity and hardware tradeoffs with AI prototyping and scenario testing before committing investment, paired with solid product, engineering, and financial judgment.

• Weigh cost, performance, and reliability against each other, and prioritize multi-year capacity investments with partners across engineering, finance, and supply chain.

• Advance platform and hardware transition strategy, and help the fleet run more efficiently as workloads grow.

• Set success metrics, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and KPIs (key performance indicators), and shape investment priorities with leadership.

• Explain complex technical and financial tradeoffs to executives in a way that leads to decisions.

• Mentor other product managers and move the team toward better, AI-forward ways of working.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development

• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development

• OR equivalent experience.

• 4+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).

• 6+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).

• 6+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).

• Experience taking on ambiguous, high-stakes work and driving it from strategy through execution across organizations.

• Experience leading large-scale cloud infrastructure, capacity planning, or distributed systems work, with grasp of hyperscale service delivery.

• AI fluency, including using AI agents, automation, and prototyping to speed up analysis, decisions, and product work.

• Experience using telemetry, demand signals, and operational data to guide platform and investment decisions.

• Systems-level problem solving and clear communication, with the ability to influence senior leaders and align stakeholders across organizations.

#M365Core, #M365CorePlatform, #M365FleetCapacity

Product Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

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. (