Software Engineering Manager (AI-native development)

Job description

**Overview** If you love the pursuit of excellence and are inspired by the challenges that come through driving innovations that impact how the world lives, works and plays, then we invite you to learn more about Microsoft Business Operations (MBO) - and the value we deliver across Microsoft and to our customers and partners. We offer unique opportunities to work on interesting global projects in an environment that appreciates diversity, focuses on talent development and recognizes and rewards great work. As a Software Engineering Manager, you’ll support, coach, and lead the teams that build and operate the platforms powering how Microsoft does business - growing engineers, driving delivery, and solving complex, high-impact problems at global scale. ## Position Description As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of engineers to design, develop, and operate software solutions across a set of products and services, while owning the growth, development, and performance of the people on your team. You will partner with product managers, technical leads, and cross-functional stakeholders to confirm customer and business requirements and guide your team in translating them into secure, reliable, scalable, and maintainable solutions. You will lead the disciplined use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle, ensuring your team takes responsibility for the content of its AI-generated artifacts and integrates Responsible AI practices. You will own and lead architecture discussions and complex design reviews, guide test strategy and security testing, manage dependencies across teams, and uphold Microsoft standards of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility. As a people manager, you will model our culture, coach your team, and care for each individual - driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance. 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** ## Responsibilities As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead across the engineering lifecycle for a set of products and services - guiding your team to design, code, test, deploy, and operate solutions that are secure, reliable, accessible, and maintainable - while delivering success through your people. You will own architecture decisions, drive project planning, lead the disciplined use of AI tools across the development lifecycle, and manage the growth, development, and performance of your engineers. - **People management.** Deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring - live our culture and values, define team objectives and outcomes, enable success across boundaries, and help the team adapt and learn. Attract and retain great people, know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations, and invest in the growth of others while driving employee development, project execution, and performance management. - **AI-native development.** Lead your team in the disciplined use of AI tools and practices across the full software development lifecycle, ensuring engineers take responsibility for the content of their AI-generated artifacts and incorporate Responsible AI practices. Coach the team on applying engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE, Engineering System Success Playbook) to improve processes, and champion experimentation with new AI tools and practices. - **Coding.** Guide your team within and across teams to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that adheres to design specifications. Lead efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, and cost; provide deep expertise on coding and validation strategy; and lead the identification and escalation of blockers, communicating how they impact timelines. - **Code reviews.** Coach engineers to review product and test code for team standards, correct test coverage, coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices. Conduct timely reviews that accelerate the team’s pace, consider diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability, and ensure automated source-code analysis is built into the development process. - **Design and architecture.** Own and lead architecture discussions and design decisions for complex products and solutions, testing and exploring design options, outlining strengths and weaknesses, and recommending the best approach. Create and review architecture and design documents, evaluate new technologies, and ensure designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost (COGS), security, and privacy requirements. Review complex designs within and across teams to recommend improvements. - **Testing and quality.** Guide your team in creating clear test strategies that ensure solution quality and prevent regression, incorporating security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Lead efforts to close test gaps, improve suite speed, reliability, and defect localization, ensure testable code, and leverage AI tools for test automation. - **Customer requirements.** Guide partnership with internal and external stakeholders (e.g., product managers, privacy/security subject matter experts, technical leads, customer escalation teams) to confirm customer and user requirements and their feasibility. Leverage a variety of feedback channels to incorporate customer insights into current and future designs, and advocate for the security and privacy needs of customers. - **Dependencies and coordination.** Lead the identificatio