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Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Hyderabadfull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineering Manager in W+D Silicon and Fundamentals Team responsible for setting technical and execution direction, leading AI/silicon/software initiatives, and driving AI-forward engineering practices at scale to improve productivity, quality, and developer effectiveness.

Responsibilities

  • Lead, coach, and support a team of Software Engineers with clear expectations, feedback, and career guidance through one-on-one connections, mentoring, and performance discussions.
  • Set and align technical direction and execution plans by partnering with Product Managers and cross-functional stakeholders to translate customer needs and business priorities into engineering plans.
  • Support operational excellence and delivery consistency by reinforcing engineering fundamentals, planning practices, and coordinated response to incidents and live-site issues.
  • Leverage customer feedback, telemetry, and product usage data to identify improvement opportunities, prioritize investments, and guide teams toward long-term Windows Fundamentals enhancements.
  • Establish and reinforce engineering practices for design reviews, code reviews, testing, and continuous integration to support secure, maintainable, and scalable solutions.
  • Provide technical guidance and escalation support by working with engineers on complex diagnostics using debugging tools, performance analysis, and code-level investigation, and representing the team in cross-organization discussions.
  • Foster a customer-focused and inclusive team environment where engineers understand customer impact, collaborate across teams, and take shared ownership of outcomes that matter to customers.
  • Champion AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows across the org; set standards and expectations so teams use AI to move faster without compromising security or quality.
  • Establish guardrails and best practices for responsible use of AI tools—ensuring correctness, security, privacy, and compliance.
  • Encourage teams to use AI to accelerate root-cause analysis and debugging, improve test coverage and validation, and reduce toil through automation and repeatable workflows.
  • Partner with AI-forward initiatives across Windows to scale learnings, patterns, and reusable assets.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technical field AND 12+ years in AI/ML software or systems engineering
  • 4+ years of people management experience, including hiring and developing engineering teams
  • Act as the primary bridge between model development teams, software API engineers, and Microsoft ecosystem stakeholders to define feature acceptance thresholds and validation gating
  • Lead the design and delivery of internal tools that automate the measurement of accuracy degradation (e.g., drift in quantized INT4/INT8 models) and API-level performance overheads
  • Align engineering metrics with the Windows AI Foundry, DirectML, and ONNX Runtime specifications to ensure flawless execution providers
  • Establish regression tracking systems to evaluate how model updates alter API response latencies, memory footprint, and user-experience quality across Windows PC form factors
  • Strong technical background in systems, platform, on-device AI experiences with the ability to guide architecture and technical decisions
  • Strong familiarity with the Windows ML architecture, DirectML, and implementing Execution Providers (EPs) within ONNX Runtime
  • Proven track record of working side-by-side with model training/fine-tuning teams and application-layer software engineers
  • Familiarity with Windows architecture, OS fundamentals, and On Device AI concepts
  • Familiarity with scripting or automation to support operational efficiency and repeatable processes

Skills

Required:Leadership and people managementTechnical leadershipAI/ML systems engineeringProduct and stakeholder collaboration
Last updated Oct 1, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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