Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Microsoft operates Substrate, a foundational cloud platform that powers critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot at global scale. The Principal Site Reliability Engineering Manager will lead teams responsible for the reliability, security, compliance, and operational excellence of Substrate services in highly regulated environments, while developing engineering talent and shaping cross-organizational strategy.
Responsibilities
- Lead and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineer ICs, providing clear expectations, regular coaching, and career guidance across senior and principal levels. Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and inclusion
- Own the operational health and reliability posture of Substrate services running in regulated environments, ensuring strong availability, incident readiness, and recovery practices
- Drive change and influence across the org as you establish and drive SLOs, SLIs, and operational metrics, using data and learning loops to continuously improve reliability, diagnosability, and customer experience
- Lead effective incident management and post-incident reviews, emphasizing systemic fixes, automation, and long-term resilience rather than short-term remediation
- Serve as an actively engaged on-call engineer (OCE) and participate in an on-call rotation, leading incident response for Substrate services in regulated environments, providing hands-on leadership during incidents, and driving high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable engineering improvements
- Own reliability, resilience, and disaster recovery, including driving and coordinating DR and game day exercises, validating recovery objectives, and ensuring operational playbooks and restore procedures remain current, effective, and auditable
- Drive engineering led operational excellence at scale, leveraging strong software engineering practices, automation, and AI assisted techniques to reduce operational toil, improve diagnosability, and raise overall service and OCE health in partnership with infrastructure and service teams
- Partner with engineering and product teams to embed reliability, security, and compliance considerations early in service design, architecture, and deployment decisions
- Influence technical and operational strategy beyond your immediate team, particularly for cross‑cutting reliability and compliance challenges that span multiple services or organizations
- Represent your team’s work clearly to leadership and partners, articulating risks, trade‑offs, and progress in regulated environments with precision and credibility
- Build strong cross-functional relationships with security, compliance, infrastructure, and operations teams to deliver durable, compliant, and auditable reliability outcomes. ‑functional relationships with security, compliance, infrastructure, and operations teams to deliver
Skills
- Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
- Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law
- This role needs to be able to access Substrate's GCCM, GCCH, and DoD environments. This requires at least a favorably adjudicated T3 background check (for GCCH/DoD) as well as CJIS (for GCCM)
- Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 15+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience
- 9+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems
- 5+ years people management experience
- Experience operating or supporting services in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments
- For manager roles, T5 is preferred
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
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