Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft’s Strategic Missions and Technologies (SMT) Division embraces next generation opportunities on behalf of our critical products, ideating from the customer problem forward. SMT focuses on next-generation technology solutions including telecommunications, connecting the cloud to satellites in space, quantum computing, and as a technology partner to the United States Federal government.  

In Mission Engineering, we foster a welcoming, inclusive environment that represents the vast perspectives needed in building and providing global and world-class services to which customers trust their most mission critical businesses. We embrace being a place where everyone belongs and does their work. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineering Manager. You will play an important role in evolving the program, ensuring its scalability, sustainability, and ongoing success. If you embrace a growth mindset, understand the complexities of change management, and want to blend efficiency and storytelling acumen with driving the execution of projects that materially impact results, this is a great opportunity to join a team motivated in shaping both culture and future. 

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

People Management 

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Understand User Requirements 

• Guides partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements within and across teams. Leverages a variety of feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs or solution fixes. Guides incorporation of appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value. Begins to determine additional critical metrics.

Design 

• Guides others through efforts and discussions for architecture of aspects of products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations and owns design decisions and oversees the less experienced team members. Guides others and writes documents for designs or User Stories and determines the technology that will be leveraged and how they will interact. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Guides employees to consider, and leads efforts to assure system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations.
• Guides team in creating clear and articulated plan for testing, and defines success for test outcomes. Identifies needs for a broad versus selected approach in testing mechanisms and makes informed decisions to implement the most effective tests. Leads and guides efforts to augment test cases and ensure the solutions have good test coverage. Leads efforts to ensure the scalability and reliability of the test framework during design. Leads efforts to integrate automation features during testing planning.
• Guides teams and leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. Leads identification of other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's system may provide support to others. Guides teams through efforts to determine back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product. Demonstrates deep understanding of up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, driving reliability in the solutions, and optimize dependency chains and retrieves across teams. Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. Enables cross-team communications and resolves conflicts between team