Jobs and Careers

Software Engineering Manager

United States, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 18 Aug 2026

About the role

Overview

Our team helps engineering teams across Microsoft build and operate services on Azure Kubernetes Service with greater speed, security, reliability, and scale. Cloud technology is transforming how every organization builds, runs, and scales digital products. Within Azure, our team focuses on capabilities that make Azure Kubernetes Service easier for Microsoft product teams to adopt and operate. By reducing common infrastructure complexity, we help teams accelerate delivery, strengthen security and compliance, and focus more on the experiences their customers rely on.

Our customers are engineering teams across Microsoft. We create reusable capabilities that reduce the operational burden of running large-scale services, so product teams can focus more of their energy on customer-facing innovation. In this role, you will work on Kubernetes, security, distributed systems, reliability, observability, and cloud infrastructure. You will join a talented, diverse, and supportive organization that values learning, technical excellence, thoughtful collaboration, and craftsmanship. We work on complex cloud infrastructure problems with broad impact, and we invest in helping engineers and managers grow while delivering meaningful results for the teams and customers who depend on Microsoft’s cloud. Microsoft engineering teams build services on a secure, scalable Kubernetes platform.

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

Guide engineering direction, make pragmatic architecture decisions, write and review technical designs, and help a team shape the secure, reliable foundation used by product teams across Microsoft.
Lead a globally distributed team of software engineers and work closely with partner teams across Azure. You will help define ambiguous problems, align stakeholders on technical direction, own architecture and design discussions, and guide implementation for infrastructure that supports Microsoft services at scale.
Help the team apply AI-enabled tools responsibly, in alignment with Responsible AI principles, across the software development lifecycle to improve engineering productivity, quality, security, and operational agility.
Guide engineering practices for maintainable code, design reviews, testing strategies, secure development, CI/CD, safe deployment, telemetry, monitoring, and production operations.
Help the team identify dependencies, resolve development blockers, respond to incidents, learn from retrospectives, and continuously improve the reliability, compliance, privacy, and performance of the systems it owns.
Be accountable for team health, coaching and performance development, planning, execution, and delivery. You will help engineers grow their careers while building a team that delivers reliable, durable infrastructure at Microsoft scale.

Qualifications

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.

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:

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 technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
6+ years people management experience.
3+ years of experience with cloud-native technologies such as containers and Kubernetes.
Awareness of, and ability to reason about, modern software and systems architectures, including distributed systems failure modes, microservices, load balancing, queuing, caching, and service reliability patterns.
Experience designing, building, and