Principal Software Engineering Manager, AI Experiences

Microsoft · New York City · $142,800–$274,800 (stated in the posting)

Overview

Microsoft Monetize powers an open, transparent advertising marketplace, connecting advertisers and publishers across thousands of websites and applications. Its buy-side and sell-side technology enables customers to access and trade premium advertising inventory efficiently and at global scale.

The Monetize Real-time Platform executes dynamic advertising auctions in less than 100 milliseconds, handles more than 8 million queries per second and approximately 100 billion requests per day, and generates more than 150 TB of new data daily. Its distributed systems support auction execution, ad delivery, and marketplace accounting under demanding performance and reliability constraints.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead the Infrastructure, Operations and Shared Tech team. The team’s scope spans foundational infrastructure, production operations, and selected shared software services and libraries that power the real-time platform. These capabilities include distributed caching, model and configuration distribution, low-latency decision-service integration, traffic management, and high-volume logging and streaming pipelines.

You will combine people leadership with deep technical judgment to advance platform architecture, operational excellence, and engineering productivity across hybrid on-premises and Azure environments. You will guide engineers working on performance-sensitive C/C++ services, shared-runtime modernization, distributed-cache migrations, and the integration of model-backed capabilities into real-time serving.

This role requires a leader who can connect infrastructure decisions to application behavior and business outcomes. You will own the team’s roadmap and delivery, develop engineers, and partner across platform, product, machine learning, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable shared capabilities that make the broader engineering organization more effective.

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.  

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop engineers. Hire, coach, and grow a team spanning infrastructure, operations, and shared-platform software. Establish clear expectations, support career development, and foster an inclusive culture of technical excellence and accountability.
Own the team’s roadmap and delivery. Translate platform and product needs into priorities, architectural plans, and measurable outcomes. Balance feature delivery with reliability, security, technical debt, infrastructure cost, and operational sustainability.
Guide shared-platform architecture. Lead the design and evolution of reusable services, libraries, interfaces, and runtime components used across real-time applications. Establish clear ownership boundaries and maintain compatibility as systems evolve.
Advance low-latency software engineering. Guide improvements in concurrency, asynchronous execution, memory safety, data structures, and resource efficiency for high-throughput Linux services. Maintain a high bar for design reviews, code quality, and automated testing.
Modernize distributed caching and state services. Lead client and server integration, migration, capacity planning, replication, failover, and observability for cache-backed serving capabilities. Ensure predictable behavior under timeouts, partial failures, and changing workloads.
Enable model-backed serving and traffic management. Partner with machine learning and auction teams to integrate model scores and decisions into real-time services, including traffic shaping and dynamic pricing capabilities. Preserve latency budgets, decision correctness, fallback behavior, and experimentation controls.
Evolve logging and streaming infrastructure. Improve high-volume data collection, buffering, batching, transport, and downstream integration. Address throughput, backpressure, data integrity, and recovery across distributed pipelines.
Lead safe infrastructure modernization. Deliver infrastructure-as-code and shared-service migrations to Azure through staged validation, controlled cutovers, and practical rollback plans. Coordinate dependencies across networking, storage, and data-platform teams.
Drive operational excellence. Improve service-level objectives, monitoring, alerting, diagnostics, and on-call practices. Guide incident response and blameless postmortems, turning recurring production issues into durable engineering improvements.
Improve developer productivity and secure delivery. Advance build systems, CI/CD, deployment automation, configuration management, and reusable tooling. Embed security and privacy requirements into application and infrastructure design.

Qualifications

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:

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 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 equivalent experience.
3+ years of people management experience leading software engineering teams, including coaching, performance management, and career development.
Experience designing, delivering, and operating large-scale distributed systems, including performance-sensitive backend services.
Experience leading cross-team engineering initiatives involving shared platforms, infrastructure, or production-service modernization.
Solid understanding of software architecture and production reliability, including concurrency, resource management, and distributed-system failure modes.
Experience with high-performance C/C++ software on Linux, including multithreading, asynchronous I/O, memory ownership, profiling, and efficient data structures.
Experience building shared libraries or foundational services adopted by multiple engineering teams, including interface evolution and backward compatibility.
Experience with distributed caches or key-value systems such as Aerospike, Garnet, Redis, or comparable technologies, including replication, failover, capacity planning, and client integration.
Experience with Kafka or comparable streaming systems and high-throughput logging or data-distribution pipelines.
Experience integrating machine learning scores or model-backed decisions into latency-sensitive production services; model-training experience is not required.
Experience with traffic shaping, rate limiting, admission control, or other mechanisms for balancing throughput, capacity, and business value.
Experience operating Azure and hybrid infrastructure, including virtual machine scale sets, networking, storage, and infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform or Bicep.
Experience with configuration management tools such as Puppet or comparable systems, CI/CD pipelines, and automated build and test environments.
Experience delivering migrations using feature flags, experimentation, shadow traffic, staged rollouts, and rollback strategies.
Experience with observability technologies such as Grafana or OpenTelemetry and with service-level objectives, incident management, and operational automation.
Experience with advertising auctions, pricing, inventory-quality controls, or other high-volume real-time transaction systems.

#AIX

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:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

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