Principal Software Engineering Manager

Overview Security represents one of the most critical priorities for our customers in a world of evolving digital threats, increasing regulatory requirements, growing estate complexity, and rapid advances in AI. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place by empowering every user, customer, and developer with integrated security solutions that protect across heterogeneous environments.

Perception is an advanced Agentic AI platform designed to empower security and IT teams to operate at the speed and scale of AI while adhering to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead an engineering team responsible for defining, building, and evolving the foundational capabilities of the Perception Platform . This role will focus on enabling AI platform capabilities to operate securely, reliably, and at scale across multiple tenants and diverse enterprise environments.

In this role, you will lead engineers solving complex and ambiguous challenges across Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), memory, reasoning, agentic and multi-agent systems, identity and authorization, AI safety, distributed cloud services, and platform infrastructure.

You will set technical direction, develop high-performing engineering teams, and drive the delivery of reusable platform capabilities that can support varying tenant configurations, infrastructure dependencies, security boundaries, compliance requirements, and deployment models.

You will lead the strategy and execution for reducing tenant-specific dependencies and creating consistent platform patterns across identity, compute, storage, networking, configuration, deployment, observability, reliability, security, and AI execution.

This includes evolving existing production architectures while enabling capabilities to be deployed, configured, validated, monitored, and operated consistently across tenant environments.

This role requires proven engineering leadership, deep technical and architectural judgment, and an automation-first mindset, along with demonstrated success building and growing high-performing engineering teams.

You will partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, security experts, architects, and partner teams to translate complex customer, product, security, and tenant requirements into clear engineering strategies, architectures, roadmaps, and execution plans.

As a Principal Software Engineering Manager, you will identify systemic engineering challenges, establish technical and organizational direction, develop senior technical talent, and drive architectural alignment across teams. You will create engineering mechanisms and reusable capabilities that extend impact beyond a single feature, service, or team.

You will be accountable for both what the team delivers and how effectively it executes, including engineering quality, operational excellence, technical debt management, reliability, security, development velocity, and the growth of engineers and technical leaders.

This is an opportunity to lead challenging engineering work at the intersection of AI, security, distributed systems, identity, and multi-tenant cloud architecture, while building the teams and technical foundations needed to deliver Microsoft Security AI capabilities securely and consistently to customers at scale.

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

• Lead, build, and grow a high-performing engineering team responsible for foundational Perception Platform capabilities, fostering an inclusive culture centered on technical excellence, customer impact, accountability, learning, collaboration, and strong engineering ownership.
• Define and drive the engineering strategy, architecture, and execution for production-grade AI platform capabilities spanning generative AI, retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), memory, reasoning, model interaction, agent orchestration, execution, evaluation, extensibility, security, and safety. This includes scalable RAG architectures covering ingestion, indexing, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, context construction, grounding, provenance, re-ranking, retrieval evaluation, and appropriate tenant and authorization boundaries.
• Provide technical leadership for agentic and multi-agent AI systems , including planning, reasoning, tool use, task decomposition and delegation, agent collaboration, state and memory management, human-in-the-loop patterns, failure recovery, and bounded autonomous execution.
• Design scalable, secure, multi-tenant platform architectures with clear engineering principles for tenant isolation, identity boundaries, authentication, authorization, configuration, data protection, deployment, and operations. Drive identity and access patterns across user, workload, service, and agent identities, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), delegated authorization, least-privilege access, and secure propagation of identity and authorization context across distributed and agentic workflows.
• Partner with Principal engineers, architects, and senior technical leaders to establish reusable platform abstractions and architectural patterns across compute, storage, networking, identity, configuration, deployment, observability, and service integration. Identify systemic dependencies and evolve existing production services toward reusable, configurable, loosely coupled, and scalable architectures that reduce tenant-specific dependencies and improve engineering leverage across teams.
• Drive an automation-first strategy for platform deployment and operations, including tenant provisioning, configuration, deployment, validation, upgrades, migrations, and operational readiness. Build for differences in tenant configuration, service availability, infrastructure topology, networking, identity, security, sovereignty, and compliance requirements while avoiding unnecessary tenant-specific coupling throughout the application stack.
• Ensure security, authorization, tenant isolation, quality, and reliability are maintained end-to-end across AI retrieval, reasoning, planning, and execution. Establish automated testing and validation mechanisms that verify functional correctness, tenant isolation, authorization, security, configuration, deployment readiness, compatibility, and reliability across heterogeneous environments, including validation of agent-generated plans and tool calls against applicable security, safety, authorization, and compliance policies.
• Own service health, reliability, security, observability, and live-site excellence for the team's platform capabilities. Establish monitoring, diagnostics, and operational practices that enable teams to understand platform health, detect systemic issues, isolate tenant-specific failures, troubleshoot distributed services and AI workflows, prevent incidents, rapidly mitigate issues, perform root cause analysis, learn from failures, and systematically eliminate recurring operational problems.
• Translate long-term technical strategy into clear priorities and execution plans, balancing customer commitments, platform investments, architectural improvements, operational excellence, security, technical debt, and engineering velocity. Use engineering signals, operational metrics, customer feedback, and business priorities to continuously improve platform reliability, engineering productivity, team effectiveness, and customer outcomes.
• Partner across engineering, product, design, security, privacy, compliance, infrastructure, and partner organizations to align dependencies, resolve