Principal SW Engineering Manager--Win365 Team

Overview

Windows Cloud Experiences (WCX) is developing a best-in-class virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to enable millions of customers to work with physical and virtual PCs. WCX is hiring a Principal SWE manager for the Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) organization, which is recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for last 4 years.

With the momentum from customers transitioning to cloud-based solutions, Windows 365 and AVD have become a billion-dollar business and continue to experience rapid growth. At its core, W365 and AVD provide customers with a modern, elastic, cloud-based Windows experience that feels like local.

As a Principal Software Engineer Manager, you will lead a high-performing team responsible for building the infrastructure to host and support services for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop across the engineering lifecycle. You will partner closely with component engineering, security, product management, and architecture teams to deliver solutions for core infrastructure, deployment systems, governance, observability, automation, and reliability foundations that support millions of Cloud PCs.

This role requires a solid technical leader with deep experience in large-scale cloud services, distributed systems, Azure infrastructure, and engineering operations. You will collaborate across Windows, Azure, Security, Identity, Networking, Data Platform, and Service Engineering teams to deliver highly available, secure, and scalable services for customers around the world.

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

You will get an amazing opportunity to contribute to both business and technology. This role is crucial to our engineering team, drive full end to end engineering cycle of critical scenario, collaborate with internal partner teams and plan, design, implement and live site support with high quality:

Technical Leadership

• Define and drive the long-term infrastructure strategy and technical roadmap for Windows 365.
• Lead architecture decisions for highly scalable, resilient, and secure cloud platforms and services.
• Establish engineering standards, reliability practices, and operational excellence frameworks across the organization.
• Drive platform modernization initiatives focused on scalability, security, compliance, automation, and efficiency.
• Partner closely with Azure and platform teams to influence platform capabilities and service architecture.

Reliability and Operations

• Own service fundamentals including availability, resiliency, performance, disaster recovery, capacity management, and observability.
• Drive continuous improvements in live-site operations, incident management, root cause elimination, and operational readiness.
• Lead investments in deployment systems, engineering automation, infrastructure governance, and service health monitoring.
• Ensure services meet customer expectations and Microsoft operational excellence standards.

Organizational Leadership

• Build, develop, and lead a high-performing infrastructure engineering organization.
• Coach and mentor engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Create clarity around strategy, priorities, execution, and success metrics.
• Foster an inclusive culture focused on accountability, collaboration, innovation, and customer obsession.
• Drive talent development, succession planning, and organizational health.

Cross-Company Influence

• Partner with engineering, product management, security, compliance, and business leaders across Microsoft.
• Drive large-scale initiatives spanning multiple organizations and service teams.
• Influence technical direction, resource investment, and platform strategy across Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.
• Represent infrastructure and operational excellence priorities in executive reviews and strategic planning discussions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Science or other technical field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience building scalable services and infrastructure on top of cloud infrastructure like Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• 3+ years’ experience leading engineering teams delivering complex infrastructure, platform, release, or validation systems.
• Demonstrated ability to harness next-generation AI development tools like GitHub Copilot, Copilot CLI/SDK, Claude CLI, or equivalents to transform the SDLC by building agents, plugins, skills, and MCP servers that drive automation and engineering excellence at scale.
• Technical experience and knowledge in Enterprise-scale cloud infrastructure, architecture designs & proficiency in Azure PaaS services and cloud-native platforms, including:
• App Platform & Compute: Web Apps, Function Apps, AKS, Azure Container Apps.
• Data & Databases: Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse, and NoSQL databases.
• Excellent technical design skills and proven ability to drive large scale system designs for commercial projects or products.
• Experience and involvement with DevOps.
• Fluent English communication skill.
• Ambitious, self-motivated.
• Agile, can-do attitude and great at dealing with ambiguity.
• Solid coding, debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Solid knowledge of object-oriented programming language paradigms.
• Keen interest in mentoring early in career engineers.
• Ability to generate clarity in ambiguous situations.
• Ability to quickly ramp up, understand complex problems, and create solutions across many products.
• Great communication skills to collaborate cross-group and work effectively within the team.
• Expertise in developing large scale services.
• Experience monitoring system performance, diagnosing and resolving issues, and implementing improvements to ensure reliability and a seamless user experience.

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