Principal Software Engineering Manager

Overview

The Cloud Delivery Team within Microsoft Defender Org builds the engineering systems and services that enable product capabilities to reach cloud environments safely, reliably, and efficiently. We partner across service engineering and operations teams to strengthen deployment pipelines, automate release readiness and validation, and improve how deployments are diagnosed, recovered, and operated at scale. Our goal is to reduce operational complexity and repetitive manual work while preserving the safeguards required to deliver secure and dependable services.

As a Principal Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of engineers responsible for advancing the software, architecture, and engineering practices behind Microsoft Defender’s cloud delivery capabilities. You will set technical direction, develop engineering talent, and drive the execution of solutions that improve deployment safety, reliability, and operational efficiency across the organization.

You will collaborate with teams throughout Microsoft Defender to identify shared challenges, build reusable capabilities, and establish scalable approaches to deployment automation. This role combines people leadership with deep technical engagement, including architecture, design and code reviews, and troubleshooting complex production issues.

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

• Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing engineering team by setting clear expectations, providing actionable feedback, managing performance, and creating meaningful career growth opportunities.
• Establish engineering priorities and deliver results through the team while balancing new deployment capabilities with service reliability, security, operational support, and long-term maintainability.
• Lead the architecture and design of Azure deployment automation and infrastructure tooling, including service dependencies, integration boundaries, deployment safety, observability, and failure recovery.
• Maintain deep technical engagement through architecture and design reviews, code contributions, and complex production troubleshooting while strengthening engineers’ technical judgment, accountability, and end-to-end ownership.
• Partner with engineering and operations teams across Microsoft Defender to automate deployment preparation, validation, and recovery; reduce manual handoffs; and establish clear ownership of shared tooling and operational processes.
• Improve engineering efficiency across Microsoft Defender by identifying recurring deployment and operational challenges, simplifying existing workflows, and building reusable solutions that deliver measurable value across multiple services.
• Use deployment telemetry, operational metrics, and incident learnings to evaluate outcomes and guide investments in testing, observability, release validation, and safe rollout practices.

Required 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.

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.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor'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 Master'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. - 4+ years of experience managing software engineers, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. - 4+ years of experience leading an engineering team responsible for prioritizing, delivering, operating, and supporting production software or services while managing cross-team dependencies and balancing reliability, security, and operational requirements. - 4+ years of experience leading teams that build and operate Azure infrastructure, deployment automation, shared developer platforms, or similar cloud-based engineering systems. - 4+ years of experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure as code technologies such as Bicep or Azure Resource Manager templates, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, and deployment validation and recovery for distributed services. - 4+ years of experience improving deployment reliability across regional, regulated, sovereign, or otherwise constrained cloud environments; using telemetry, reliability metrics, and incident learnings to guide engineering investments; and communicating technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs to engineering partners and organizational leaders.

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Pay and benefits

Software Engineering M5 - 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.

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

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