Microsoft Teams AI Platform is building the foundational platform for AI agents to seamlessly integrate into daily work conversations, automatically handling tasks, providing insights, and connecting users with the right tools and information. The team is looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the backend platform services that power this AI ecosystem, transforming productivity across chats, channels, and meetings.
Requirements
- 5+ years experience managing backend engineering teams and complex distributed systems.
- Solid technical background in cloud platforms, microservices architecture, and high-availability service design.
- Experience with AI/ML platforms, agent orchestration systems, OpenAI APIs, or multi-agent frameworks
- Background working with Microsoft Azure, .NET, or Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
- Previous experience in platform or developer tools teams.
- Experience leading cross-functional collaboration across multiple engineering organizations with strong incident response and ability to drive technical decisions in ambiguous environments.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership for dependency identification and development of design documents for AI platform services, agent orchestration APIs, and intelligent workflow systems.
- Partner with project managers and technical leads across Microsoft to determine system requirements for AI agent integrations, MCP (Model Context Protocol) implementations, and multi-modal backend services for Teams.
- Drive code optimization, debugging, and refactoring initiatives to improve AI backend service performance, model inference efficiency, and ROI across the platform.
- Lead extensive cross-group collaboration, coordinating project plans and release schedules across Teams, Azure AI, M365, and partner engineering organizations.
- Spearhead resolution of complex production incidents for high-availability AI services and direct engineering efforts across multiple product lines and organizational boundaries.
- Stay informed of emerging AI platform standards (MCP, OpenAI APIs, multi-agent frameworks) and communicate best practices to ensure backend systems scale to meet evolving AI workload requirements and performance expectations.
Other
- Lead a team responsible for the backend platform services that power the Teams AI ecosystem.
- Manage the technical strategy and execution for the foundational services, data models, and APIs that enable AI agents and integrations to work seamlessly within Teams.
- Serve as a leader across end-user experiences and scenarios.
- 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.
