Principal Technical Program Manager

The Office of the CTO (OCTO) for Microsoft is chartered with understanding, shaping, and accelerating technologies and their impact on Microsoft, industry, and society in order to empower every person and every organization to achieve more. Whether it is providing technical insights company-wide or giving meaning to an “AI First” company, the Office of the CTO is both leading investments in the next cutting edge bet areas of technical innovation as well as working across the company with our engineering, field, and strategy teams. 

As a Principal Technical Program Manager, you will extend OCTO’s capacity to deliver deeply technical, multi-dimensional insights that shape Microsoft’s technology direction. 

This role is ideal for a systems thinker with strong technical depth across the Artificial Intelligence (AI) stack—spanning hardware, models, data, evaluation, and implementation. You will work closely with engineering, research, and strategy teams to prototype ideas, synthesize trends, and translate insights into actionable strategies that inform the CTO and senior leadership. 

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

• Partner with engineering teams to validate ideas through prototyping and experimentation.
• Stay closely engaged with a wide range of services, platforms, frameworks, and hardware - across Microsoft, competitors, open source, and startups - to identify and prioritize top issues and opportunities in AI.
• Monitor internal and external research to surface cutting-edge investments and productization opportunities that advance Microsoft’s technical differentiation.
• Drive cross-organizational projects that align teams around a shared strategic vision. Partner with engineering leaders to evolve Microsoft’s culture of AI innovation through evidence-based practices.
• Develop technical reading materials for the CTO and senior engineering leaders, including summaries, highlighted focus areas, and prioritized reading sequences. Source materials may include academic research, business media, consultancy reports, internal white papers, demos, prototypes, and expert commentary.
• Deliver a range of research-based recommendations - from directional guidance and technical proposals to direct prototyping - tailored to the topic, scope, and complexity.
• Champion technical enablement by identifying and removing barriers to adoption of strategic technologies across engineering teams, ensuring alignment between strategy and execution.
• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s Degree AND 12+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
• 1+ year(s) of experience reading and/or writing code (e.g., sample documentation, product demos).
• Solid foundation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technical skills, such as understanding Machine Learning (ML)/Reinforcement Lenaring (RL), AI models, building AI services or products, as well as AI infrastructure, compute, hardware, and optimization.
• Possess analytical acumen, vigilant adaptability, and critical architect design for assessing AI infrastructure, hardware, compute capability, services and tooling to enable acceleration of our bold AI ambitions.
• Demonstrated history of engineering and product expertise with experience building AI services or products for customers, preferably ones with strong responsible AI, safety and security commitments that solve high value problems.
• Ability to handle high ambiguity, drive clarity, and identify/prioritize issues and opportunities.
• Ability to communicate thoughts both verbally and in written form at the appropriate