Overview

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

As the Principal Software Engineering Manager within the Windows Search Platform Engineering team, you will be responsible for:

- Owning the technical direction and architecture for the Windows Search Platform from design through retail delivery.
- Driving the evolution of Search Platform into an AI-native infrastructure layer, enabling Copilot, MCP/LLM integrations, and future agentic discovery patterns while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability and performance.
- Leading cross-functional partnerships with Products, File Explorer, Windows Search Box and other external partners to drive architectural consensus, scope clarity, and release governance.
- Establishing and enforcing release discipline and observability as first-class requirements.
- Defining and driving data-backed engineering decisions across the platform.
- Leading, mentoring, and growing a team of 7-10 engineers — running effective 1:1s, providing direct feedback, building explicit growth paths, and cultivating a culture of engineering rigor, ownership, and speed.
- Recruiting and retaining top systems engineering talent, with a bias toward people who are curious about and energized by AI-native development and Windows platform internals.




- Representing your team's work to senior leadership, communicating trade-offs, risks, delivery timelines, and strategic context with clarity and confidence in forums such as Shiproom, Mission Controls, and leadership reviews.
- Driving program execution across multiple concurrent tracks (8-10 workstreams), including sprint cadence, ADO hygiene, capacity planning, and cross-org alignment.
- Championing AI-assisted engineering practices — leveraging agentic workflows, automation, and AI tooling to reduce KTLO burden, accelerate delivery, and multiply team velocity.
- Thought leadership for the broader organization on search platform architecture.

Qualifications :

- Required Qualifications**:

- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.

- OR equivalent experience.

- 4+ years of people management experience leading engineering teams.

- Solid systems programming background with experience in platform/infrastructure-level software developmExperience with search/indexing systems, database internals, file systems, or information retrieval at scale.

Preferred Qualifications :





- Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience.
- OR Bachelor's Degree AND 14+ years technical engineering experience.
- OR equivalent experience.
- 6+ years of people management experience with demonstrated track record of growing senior/principal-level engineers.
- Deep understanding of Windows internals, NT kernel, file systems (NTFS/ReFS), and OS-level search infrastructure.
- Experience driving multi-track programs (5+ concurrent workstreams) with solid release governance and retail delivery discipline.
- Proven ability to drive architectural decisions across organizational boundaries with multiple stakeholders having competing priorities.
- Track record of defining and enforcing quality gates, telemetry pipelines, observability frameworks, and data-backed engineering decisions.
- Experience with AI/ML integration in systems software — understanding of LLM consumption patterns, embedding-based retrieval, and AI-native platform design.
- Methodical analytical skills with a systematic and structured approach to software design and architecture.
- Confident and articulate in expressing ideas to mixed audiences including senior leadership with varying views and challenges.
- A sense of personal ownership and accountability, together with the ability to develop and deliver to deadlines while managing stakeholder expectations across Windows releases.
- Self-motivated with a dependable drive for reaching across teams and organizations to make progress collaboratively.

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📌 Principal Software Engineering Manager - Search (Hyderabad)
🏢 Microsoft
📍 Hyderabad