Principal + Senior Technical Program Manager

Overview

The Cloud Delivery & Governance team helps Microsoft Defender deliver reliable, secure services for customers around the world, including in sovereign and regulated cloud environments. We bring together product engineering, cloud infrastructure, and service operations to improve readiness, resolve cross-team delivery challenges, and turn operational learnings into lasting improvements for the services customers rely on.

We are looking for a Principal and Senior Technical Program Managers to shape Cloud Delivery strategy for Microsoft Defender services across global, sovereign, and regulated cloud environments. This role will connect product direction, customer needs, regional requirements, and technical realities to establish clear priorities and lead the cross-organization programs required to deliver them.

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.

Senior Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional technical programs that improve the operational readiness, reliability, and delivery performance of Microsoft security services across global, sovereign, and regulated cloud environments.
• Own program outcomes from problem definition through delivery: set success measures, milestones, dependencies, decision points, and accountability across engineering, infrastructure, operations, security, and regional teams.
• Lead readiness and live-site improvement programs that identify service risks before launch, strengthen operational controls, and close gaps that affect customer experience, availability, supportability, or compliance.
• Use incident trends, service telemetry, post-incident findings, and operational data to identify recurring failure patterns and prioritize corrective engineering and process work.
• Partner with engineering teams to simplify manual or error-prone operational processes through automation, tooling, clearer runbooks, and measurable operating practices.
• Establish execution rhythms that turn risks and incident learnings into owned actions, timely decisions, and visible progress for technical teams and senior leaders.

Principal Responsibilities

• Shape the Cloud Delivery strategy and portfolio of programs for Microsoft Defender services across global, sovereign, and regulated cloud environments.
• Partner with Microsoft Security, Azure infrastructure, product engineering, and regional teams to establish shared priorities, clarify ownership boundaries, and resolve cross-division dependencies.
• Build the fact base for strategic decisions by bringing together customer requirements, data sovereignty and locality considerations, service architecture, regional constraints, capacity, cost, and product-roadmap information.
• Work with product teams to understand service goals, technical limitations, dependencies, and investment plans, then translate those realities into actionable Cloud Delivery priorities.
• Represent customer and regional needs in planning discussions, ensuring delivery strategy reflects the conditions required to serve customers in different geographies and regulatory environments.
• Lead complex, multi-organization programs from strategy through execution, defining outcomes, milestones, decisions, risks, and measures of progress.
• Establish planning and review mechanisms that give senior leaders a clear view of portfolio health, strategic tradeoffs, unresolved decisions, and required actions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree AND 4+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development
• 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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualificaitons

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years' experience engineering, product/technical program management, or data analysis
• OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
• Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical programs in cloud, enterprise software, infrastructure, or service-operations environments.
• Working knowledge of cloud services, distributed systems, deployment and operational-readiness practices, service telemetry, or live-site operations.
• Experience using incident data, operational metrics, root-cause findings, or customer signals to identify recurring problems and drive measurable improvements.
• Practical technical fluency in one or more of data querying, telemetry analysis, scripting, workflow automation, dashboards, or engineering systems such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, Kusto, Power BI, or Grafana.
• Ability to turn ambiguous technical and operational problems into clear outcomes, plans, dependencies, decision points, and success measures.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with engineering, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to improve service reliability, readiness, and customer experience.

Pay and benefits

Technical Program Management IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Technical Program Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.