Principal Software Engineering Lead

On Team Xbox, we aspire to empower the world’s 3 billion gamers to play the games they want, with the people they want, anywhere they want. Gaming, the largest and fastest growing category in media & entertainment, represents an important growth opportunity for Microsoft. We are leading with innovation, as highlighted by bringing the Game Pass subscription to PC, bringing Xbox to new devices with Cloud Gaming, and our recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard King creating exciting new possibilities for players. 

The Xbox Experiences and Platforms team is home to the engineering work that makes this vision possible, building the developer tools and services that enable game creators to craft incredible experiences, the commerce systems that connect publishers with their audience and help gamers engage with their next favorite games, the platforms on which those games play at their best, and the experiences that turn every screen into an Xbox. 

Our team is looking for a Principal Software Engineering Lead for our Backend Services team that enables creators to build multiplayer games.  This team plays a pivotal role in building, maintaining, and operating multiplayer services for Xbox, across Console, PC and Cloud. We are looking for a leader who will drive innovation and execution that will delight our game creators. 

Responsibilities

As team leader, you will manage a creative group of 6-8 software engineers, building a broad set of highly scalable distributed services, which serve our diverse set of game creators across multiple geographical regions. You will spend about 60% of your time developing, growing, and directing engineers to reach higher potential. The balance of your time will be spent coding, driving architecture, innovation, design, and development of highly scalable intelligent services within the team, and collaborating with our partners teams. 

• You will plan, design, build, test, debug, and ship business critical software services. 

• You will collaborate with and drive positive relationships with technology partners. 

• You will have the opportunity to solve complex problems that allow for innovative features across multiple devices and services. 

• You will be a role model and active participant in a community of creativity, inclusion, and respect. 

You will be part of a world-class engineering team dedicated to the delivery of available and reliable 24x7 services.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

  • OR equivalent experience.  

• Experience building positive partnerships between teams and divisions. 

• Expertise with RESTful APIs, services, and cloud storage technologies. 

• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, threading, synchronization.
   

Preferred/Additional Qualifications:

• 3+ years managing a full-time software engineering team. 

• 2+ years programming with .NET Framework or .NET CORE. 

• Expertise in two or more of Kubernetes, Linux, Azure, GCP or AWS. 

• BS/MS degree in Computer Science (or equivalent) 

We welcome gamers and non-gamers alike, and actively seek out new perspectives to make our products better for everyone.