Principal Software Engineering Manager

At Team Xbox, we are on a mission to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone on the planet. We deliver on that vision by putting players at the center, enabling you to play the games you want, with the people you want, anywhere you want.

Gaming Player Services and Operations is at the heart of our ambition to reach billions of players across the globe, ensuring that every player feels included and engaged across Xbox. We do this through our commitment to driving operational excellence through innovation and ensuring player and partner delight across Microsoft Gaming.

As part of GPSO, the Xbox Services & Operations (XSO) team mission is to build and maintain services enabling increased customer engagement plus player growth across the Microsoft Gaming eco-system. A significant part of this responsibility involves adopting and/or creating Cloud Solutions. We leverage Azure Cloud platform capabilities; along with investing in the engineering of complementary Observability and Manageability solutions to run our Gaming business. We use this approach to apply consistent and scalable solutions across existing Xbox services, aiding in broad adoption across our Gaming business partners and consulting with acquisitions to assure their migrations to Azure Cloud are executed successfully with high degrees of Operational Excellence. The end objective being assurance that all systems within our Microsoft Gaming portfolio are operating on modern cloud capabilities thus eliminating the burdens and risks associated with dedicated infrastructure and/or legacy solutions. This role requires developing strong working relationships across business partners in Gaming, aiding in creating unified cloud adoption plans and ultimately assisting with consultation or engineering execution of the migrations.

The Xbox Accounts and Family Team owns and builds experiences involving: Gaming Accounts, GamerTags, Gamer’s Family, Parental Controls and Safety controls for Children, Account Sign up experiences for all users among many other things. 

We are looking for an engineering lead to build, Coach, grow a new team to build and run world class massive-scale cloud services that power Microsoft Xbox Family and Child Experiences across all platforms and devices. You will have an opportunity to contribute to and build world class Family and Child experiences that also meet child safety regulations around the world. These services manage 100s of millions of Xbox Accounts using massive SQL and No-SQL databases, low latency caches to provide world class experience to our users. In this role, you will manage a creative group of 4-5 software engineers building a broad set of reliable highly scalable (think millions of simultaneous users) distributed services.  As team leader you should expect to spend about 50% of your time developing, growing, and directing engineers to reach higher potential.  The balance of your time will be spent coding, driving architecture, innovation, design, and development of highly scalable intelligent services/experiences within the team, and collaborating with our internal and external partners. 

Required Qualifications 

• A Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering. 

• A love of leading people and building incredible teams. 

• 4+ years of people management experience.   

• 8 years experience delivering quality software within a professional organization.  

• 6 years programming in one or more of C#, C, C++, Java.  

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.  

• Experience building positive partnerships between teams and divisions.  

• Able to quickly resolve ambiguity and respond to rapid change.   

• Expertise with RESTful APIs, services, and cloud storage technologies  

• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, threading, synchronization. 

• Good interpersonal skills such as: building relationships, receive and provide honest feedback from peers and partners, supporting your team. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Relevant experience and passion in the gaming and services space. 

• Experience in Identity and Access management. 

• Experience creating and managing Cloud services using Kubernetes. 

• And we would love to hear about your consistently positive performance history. 

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

• Hire, Coach, Care and grow great engineers. 

• Willingness to learn various tools and technologies so you can effectively use them to deliver our wide variety of customer scenarios. 

• Work closely with Partners, Customers and Product management, Translate requirement into scalable software architecture and implementation. 

• You get to own End to End life cycle (design, develop, deploy and monitor) of multiple low latency, high scale globally deployable Cloud Services. 

• As a product innovator, you will create, scope, design, implement, validate, and release of new product features. 

• A love for working together across disciplines, partners and being an active participant in a community of inclusion and respect. 

• Provide technical vision for your areas to the broader team.