Principal Software Engineering Manager- Windows Commercial

In Windows Commerial, our job is to keep and win commercial customers by making Windows measurably better where it matters most to them.

As the Group Engineer Manager for Commercial Quality, Data & Insights (CQDI), you will lead a distributed engineering organization—spanning a newly formed team in IDC Hyderabad and engineers and program managers in Redmond—that delivers value directly on behalf of Microsoft's most important commercial customers and partners.Your team owns two complementary missions:

• Last‑mile feature completion in core Windows to retain and win high‑value commercial accounts and maintain Windows as the best value-to-cost offering available to customers. When core Windows feature teams cannot prioritize a change a major commercial customer needs, your team steps in to complete that work—coding directly in other teams' source trees and driving the change through to ship in partnership with those teams' leaders. 
• Commercial data & insights tooling that powers Microsoft's commercial success teams—building the Decision Intelligence and signal‑network capabilities that sit as a leverage layer above the Windows data‑science pipeline and enable commercial touchpoint teams to act on a superior set of data insights, offered faster than ever before.

In this role, you will demonstrate that your team embraces the latest AI‑assisted engineering to deliver useful improvements to Windows and strengthen our competitive position, while building a healthy, high‑performing team culture across two geographies and time zones. 

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.

Engineering leadership & delivery

• Own end‑to‑end delivery of OS feature changes and tooling that integrate cleanly into current and future Windows product plans, meeting quality, security, and schedule commitments.
• Guide the team to deliver code changes of solid quality that pass peer review and security scrutiny and are regression‑free, including changes made within other teams' codebases.
• Optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance, maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment.
• Operationalize AI‑assisted engineering practices (LLM‑powered IDE workflows, code generation, automated refactoring and testing) into consistent, measurable team habits.

Cross‑team navigation & influence

• Partner with Windows area leaders across In‑Market, Core, Experiences, and Developer to align on requirements, secure code‑review and integration paths, and land commercial‑critical changes in their source trees. ​It is likely that different other Windows Leaders will desire different relationships on how we work in their source trees; you will be the leader navigating this for the org.
• Guide identification of cross‑team dependencies and the development of design documents, engineering release plans, and work items in coordination with security, privacy, and peer teams.
• Represent CQDI engineering in WECE operating rhythms and translate customer and competitive signals into prioritized, trackable engineering action. 

People & organizational leadership

• Lead, coach, and grow a geographically distributed team, including hiring and ramping a newly formed IDC engineering team while integrating it with Redmond engineers and PMs. 
• Establish disciplined, sprint‑based execution—well‑scoped increments, continuous integration and test, end‑of‑sprint demos, and retrospectives that improve quality and predictability. 
• Build durable rhythms that bridge Redmond and India time zones for interviews, onboarding, code review, and day‑to‑day leadership.
• Model, coach, and care for team health, talent development, and inclusion.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
  • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years techn