Principal Product Manager

Overview

Are you excited by the opportunity to shape the future of cloud operations at planetary scale? Do you want to influence how some of Microsofts largest and most critical services are operated, recovered, and protected?

Join the Microsoft 365 Core Product Management team and help define the next generation of safe, intelligent operations.

The Microsoft 365 Substrate and Work IQ organization provides the foundational cloud platform that powers Microsoft 365 experiences used by hundreds of millions of people every day, including Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. We operate one of the worlds largest cloud-scale platforms, with a mission to deliver exceptional availability, reliability, performance, and security for some of Microsofts most critical workloads.

The future of cloud operations is increasingly driven by automation and AI-powered systems capable of detecting, diagnosing, and remediating incidents with minimal human intervention. As these agentic systems become responsible for more operational decisions and actions, ensuring they operate safely becomes one of the most important platform challenges facing the industry.

We are looking for an experienced and highly technical Principal Product Manager to define and lead our Production Safety and Automation strategy across Microsoft 365. You will be responsible for building the platform capabilities, governance models, and operational controls that enable both humans and intelligent agents to safely operate complex distributed systems at global scale.

In this role, you will partner with engineering leaders, platform architects, and AI innovators to establish a unified operational safety model that protects services while accelerating automation. You will drive investments in policy-driven safeguards, risk-aware automation, operational governance, safety enforcement, and intelligent controls that prevent unintended actions and reduce operational risk.

Your impact will span the entire Microsoft 365 infrastructure stack-from bare-metal systems and foundational platform services to Azure- and Kubernetes-based workloads. Success means creating an environment where automated systems and human operators can confidently perform operational actions, incidents are resolved faster and more consistently, operational toil is reduced, and services remain highly available even during the most challenging conditions.

This is a unique opportunity to define a new category of platform capability at Microsoft: operational safety for the era of autonomous and AI-driven operations.

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.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Production Safety and Automation across key Microsoft 365 platforms, establishing the operational safety model for both human and agentic operations at global cloud scale.

• Partner with engineering, security, and service teams across Microsoft 365 to identify operational risks, failure modes, and safety gaps, translating insights into platform capabilities that improve availability, reliability, and operational resilience.

• Lead the definition of safety guardrails, governance models, policy frameworks, and enforcement mechanisms that enable trusted automation while protecting critical production systems from unsafe actions.

• Drive platform investments that enable autonomous and human-assisted remediation, ensuring intelligent systems can safely detect, reason about, and act on production incidents with appropriate controls and oversight.

• Collaborate across Microsoft 365 product and platform teams to build and adopt shared operational safety capabilities, influencing engineering practices, operational standards, and long-term platform direction.

• Define customer and operator experiences for production safety solutions, balancing speed, automation, and operational control to reduce toil while maintaining service health and reliability.

• Establish success metrics and measurement frameworks for operational safety, automation effectiveness, incident reduction, service resilience, and platform adoption, using data-driven insights to prioritize investments and evaluate impact.

• Influence executive stakeholders and partner organizations to align on a unified operational safety strategy, driving cross-organizational execution for one of Microsofts largest cloud platforms.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree AND 12+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development

• OR equivalent experience.

• 4+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).

• 6+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).

• 6+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).

• Experience delivering platform capabilities for large-scale distributed systems, cloud services, developer platforms, or operational management systems with measurable impact on reliability, resiliency, security, operational excellence, or customer outcomes.

• Experience influencing engineering strategy and driving adoption of platform capabilities across multiple teams and organizations without direct authority.

• Experience designing and delivering automation, governance, policy enforcement, risk management, or safety mechanisms for production environments.

• Experience defining strategy and driving adoption for cloud platform, infrastructure, reliability, security, developer platform, or operational management products.

• Proven ability to define vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmaps for ambiguous, highly technical problem spaces spanning multiple organizations and stakeholders.

• Track record of going technically deep and rapidly ramping up on emerging technologies and complex architectural domains.

• Understanding of cloud operations, incident management, service reliability engineering (SRE), change management, resiliency engineering, and operational risk management practices.

• Experience applying AI, machine learning, autonomous systems, or agentic technologies to operational workflows, incident response, service management, or cloud operations.

• Product judgment, technical depth, executive presence, and written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence senior engineering and business leaders.

• Demonstrated systems thinking, structured problem solving, data-driven decision making, and analytical rigor.

• Customer-obsessed mindset with strong empathy for developers, operators, and engineers, working backwards from customer and operational needs.

• Demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous environments, bringing clarity, structure, and decisive execution to complex technical challenges.

• Collaboration and leadership skills with a proven track record of building trust, aligning stakeholders, and driving impact across organizational boundaries.

Product Management IC5 - 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.