Principal Engineering Manager

Viva Engage connects people through communities, bringing leaders and employees together to share knowledge, clarify priorities, and build relationships.   Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is the premier tool to create multi-directional dialogue between tens of millions of employees worldwide every month.    

Engage team members are at the forefront of driving AI applications and Copilot adoption to make communication and information sharing easy and authentic. Our work supports top challenges for our customers, including digital safety, trusted security standards, and deep analytics to help our customers maximize reach, reduce inefficiencies, and create a thriving organizational culture. We would love to have you join the team driving innovation, connection, and community for our valued global customers. #VivaEngage   

As a backend platform team, our engineers develop the core services that power all Viva Engage experiences. You will collaborate with feature teams to evolve platform capabilities to meet user needs reliably, securely, and ready to scale with our growth. Viva Engage has a plethora of interesting engineering challenges - like supporting large-scale conversations and communities with hundreds of thousands of participants. We deploy new code every day to our tens of millions of users and are constantly innovating to improve the system and deliver a delightful experience.   

Our stack:   

• Linux on Azure   
• GraphQL API gateway  
• Postgres, CosmosDB, Redis, RabbitMQ   
• Java and Ruby on Rails services, deployed as docker containers   
• Mesos and Kubernetes container orchestration   
• Observability: Grafana metrics, Azure Data Explorer log aggregation 
• React.js. Redux, Relay    

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 a Principal Engineering Manager, you must have a proven track record leading and managing a team of engineers spanning all aspects of software engineering life cycle and a history of delivering highly available products and services with quality and on schedule. We need someone who is hands-on, detail-oriented, and obsessed with delivering world-class experiences that are performant and built for massive scale in a 24/7 world. The day-to-day responsibilities include a blend of technical, hands-on leadership with strong people management and partnership skills.  

Responsibilities include: 

• Build, develop, grow and lead a team of high-performing engineers. 
• Scale the Engage platform to achieve projected growth and innovate on features to grow usage and meet user needs. 
• Partner with other Engineering teams, Product, Data Science stakeholders within and beyond our organization to drive strategic decisions and execution excellence, leading to great business impact. 
• Provide oversight, accountability, and leadership for technical architecture and decisions.  
• Oversee timely delivery of high quality solutions to meeting customer needs and product strategy. 
• Foster a culture that drives engineering excellence, guiding and motivating the team to constantly improve reliability, performance, security, stability, component reuse, and overall architecture of our web-based surfaces and the underlying tech-stack.   
• Embody our culture and values.   

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of people management experience.  
• Solidtrack record of hiring, managing and coaching high performing engineering teams.  
• Experience building and shipping production grade products, timely and with high quality.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Solid proficiency in programming languages such as Java, C#, C++, JavaScript.  
• Experience with Azure cloud offerings such as Azure Postgres, Azure Cosmos DB etc..  
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and leadership.  
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and a passion for delivering innovative and high-quality software.  
• Analytical skills with systematic and structured approach to software design and a passion for building highly scalable, highly reliable services and E2E scenarios.  
• Ability to communicate technical details clearly and drive complex projects to completion across organizational boundaries.  
• Experience owning 24x7 cloud services available 99.9% or better. 

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.

#vivaengage