Principal Software Engineering Manager | Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform

Job description

**Overview** Microsoft Advertising serves billions of ad decisions every day across search, native, shopping, display, audience, and AI-powered advertising experiences. Trust & Safety is foundational to this marketplace: protecting users from harmful, deceptive, and low-quality content; protecting advertisers, publishers, and partners from fraud and abuse; and ensuring Microsoft Ads operates with strong policy, privacy, security, compliance, and regulatory integrity. We are seeking a **Principal Software Engineering Manager** to lead a key engineering areas within the **Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform**. This team builds platform capabilities for advertiser and domain intelligence, AI-assisted investigation, model serving, decisioning, enforcement, human review, observability, and risk/fraud protection. This role is for an engineering leader who can combine technical depth, strong people leadership, execution discipline, and production judgment. The manager will lead a team delivering complex systems in close partnership with Applied Science, Product, Policy, Security, Privacy, Compliance, and partner engineering teams. The larger platform scope includes: - **AI-powered Trust & Safety intelligence** for understanding advertisers, domains, websites, landing pages, business identities, reputation, provenance, and policy/fraud risk. - **Deep Research Agents and AI-assisted workflows** for advertiser investigation, domain review, evidence gathering, policy reasoning, reviewer assistance, appeals, and fraud analysis. - **Decisioning and enforcement systems** for policy enforcement, fraud detection, abuse prevention, advertiser risk scoring, and marketplace protection. - **Model-serving and orchestration infrastructure** for LLMs, SLMs, wide & deep models, ensembles, classical ML, heuristics, rules, and policy controls. - **Security, Risk, and Fraud systems** for threats such as phishing, malware, cloaking, account takeover, payment abuse, fake business identities, compromised advertisers, coordinated abuse, and policy evasion. - **Human-in-the-loop, audit, and governance systems** with explainability, reproducibility, reviewability, and compliance readiness. - **Measurement and observability systems** to track enforcement quality, false positives, false negatives, latency, cost, drift, reviewer burden, advertiser impact, and live-site health. The ideal candidate has the technical credibility to guide architecture, the management experience to build and grow a high-performing team, and the operational discipline to deliver reliable platform capabilities in a complex, high-integrity environment. **Responsibilities** - Lead and grow a highly technical engineering team responsible for core areas of the Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform, including advertiser/domain intelligence, content moderation, AI-assisted investigation, decisioning, enforcement, human review, observability, and risk/fraud protection. - Set technical direction and execution priorities across platform delivery, quality, reliability, operational excellence, and live-site readiness. - Hire, coach, and develop engineers and technical leads, helping them grow in architecture, execution, production quality, ownership, and technical judgment. - Own delivery for major platform components across ingestion, signal processing, entity intelligence, model serving, content moderation, decisioning, enforcement, audit, and measurement. - Partner with senior ICs, architects, Applied Science, Product, Policy, Security, Identity, and partner engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable platform capabilities. - Drive productionization of AI/ML and agentic capabilities with clear quality, latency, cost, reliability & safety mechanisms. - Deliver real-time, nearline, and batch decisioning systems for policy enforcement, content moderation, fraud detection, abuse prevention, advertiser risk scoring, and marketplace protection. - Evangelize the team’s platform capabilities across Microsoft Ads and relevant Microsoft Trust teams, helping partner teams adopt shared systems. **Qualifications** - **Required Qualifications** - Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field - 8+ years of EM experience leading software engineering teams, including experience managing senior engineers, technical leads &  managers. - Experience leading engineering teams that build and operate large-scale production systems with meaningful reliability, scalability, latency, correctness, availability, security, and operational requirements. - Technical depth in one or more of the following areas: AI/ML systems, model-serving infrastructure, decisioning systems, distributed systems, data platforms, workflow platforms, risk platforms, security platforms, or Trust & Safety systems. - Experience partnering with Applied Science, Product, or cross-functional stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into shipped engineering systems. - Exposure to production AI/ML systems, including one or more of the following: LLM-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, model orchestration, automated reasoning, human-in-the-loop systems, AI-assisted operational tooling, or agentic workflows. - Understanding of production requirements for AI or decision systems, including evaluation, observability, quality measurement, rollout safety, fallback behavior, latency/cost tradeoffs, explainability, governance, and operational reliability. - Experience building high-integrity systems where decisions must be auditable, reproducible, explainable, governed, and secure. - Demonstrated ability to hire, grow, coach, and retain strong engineering talent in complex technical areas. - Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, risks, execution plans, and platform strategy to engineering, science, product, policy, and business stakeholders. --- **Preferred Qualifications** The