Principal Engineering Manager

Overview: 

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit thinking in a cloud-enabled world.  
 
Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging & real-time analytics, and business intelligence. The products in our portfolio include Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a data culture.  

  Within Azure Data, the databases team builds and maintains Microsoft's operational Database systems. We store and manage data in a structured way to enable multitude of applications across various industries. We are on a journey to enable developer friendly, mission-critical, AI enabled operational Databases across relational, non-relational and OSS offerings.  
   

The Azure SQL Connectivity team is looking for a talented Principal Software Engineering Manager - responsible for leading distributed teams that are focused on ensuring millions of users can access Azure SQL Databases with unparalleled security, reliability, and performance. In this role, you will be immersed in cutting-edge technology, tackling diverse challenges, and driving innovation that impacts businesses and individuals worldwide. 
 

The work we do is crucial to ensure our customers are able to access their data with high availability. You will be working on a distributed system architecture supporting connectivity at true cloud-scale across geographically distributed data centers. You will be working with technologies like Network Protocols, SDN, Gateways and support newer hardware generations. Working with a team of experts in a distributed system, your work will influence the technical direction of the Azure SQL DB service and shape the networking technologies across the entire Azure Cloud ecosystem.   

We do not just value differences or different perspectives. We seek them out and invite them in so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. As a result, our customers are better served. 

Qualifications: 

Required/Minimum Qualifications  

•   Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical discipline AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python. 

• OR equivalent experience 

• 10+ years of experience shipping high-performance C++ or C#/Java code server software. 

• 10+ years of experience with backend, storage, or database development in distributed systems environment.  

Preferred/Additional Qualifications  

•   Understanding of distributed systems and/or Operating System and/or experience with Databases, Software Defined Networking and Storage systems are highly preferred. 

• Demonstrated experience leading high-performing engineering teams that work on system software is preferred 

• Understanding and/or experience with protocols like TLS, RPCs, Network Gateways and Proxies, Microservices and Cloud Computing.    

Responsibilities: 

• Attract, retain, and lead geographically distributed teams of talented software engineers building highly scalable distributed services and infrastructure services. 

• Guides partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements within and across teams. 

• Guides teams and leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. 

• Researches and does not hesitate to dive deeper into technical issues to bring clarity to the team as needed.  

• Optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). 

• Guides team and acts as an professional for Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and monitors other engineers across product lines, working on call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. 

• Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and holds accountability for products that do not meet expectations. 

• Develop a cross-cutting technical direction and strategic planning for product development, feature enhancement and innovation in alignment with the business objectives. 

• Stay updated on recent trends in the database world with a focus on networking, reliability, scalability, and security, and be open to experimenting with promising trends on these focus areas that might open up new avenues of growth for SQL DB. 

• Provide guidance and mentor engineers, enabling them to succeed in the team and the space. 

• Embody our culture and values