Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft · Posted Oct 26
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
Get a personal compatibility score
Add a resume for personal matches
About the role
The GitHub Developer Experience (DX) team owns foundational systems and services that power GitHub's internal engineering and development workflows, spanning CI/CD platforms, developer tooling, virtualized infrastructure, and the paved paths used by engineering teams. The team runs highly available, company-wide CI platforms and partners with application and platform teams to improve reliability, performance, and developer productivity at significant scale. As a Principal Engineering Manager, you will lead a team operating these mission-critical systems, improving CI reliability, reducing test flakiness, responding to incidents, and evolving platforms while blending people leadership, technical depth, and operational ownership.
What you will do
- Collaborating with engineering teams, product management, customers, and engineering leadership to align on and understand the problems we want to solve
- Unblocking obstacles for your team members as they solve GitHub’s most critical problems, often via real-time conversations in Slack or Zoom and with asynchronous communication in GitHub Issues, PRs, Discussions, and Projects
- Communicating effectively to stakeholders and leadership of progress and risks
- Coordinating work within the team and stakeholders, building relationships, and identifying opportunities and areas of improvement
- Ensuring the team produces good architectural design outcomes, secure and resilient systems, and quality code
- Ensuring the team iteratively ships features and bug fixes, balancing speed to market with future velocity
- Conducting 1:1s with direct reports to provide regular feedback and ensure career growth and progression
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 9+ years' experience in software engineering, computer science, or related technical discipline
- Proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
- 3+ years’ experience leading engineering teams delivering complex infrastructure, platform, release, or validation systems.
- Experience setting technical direction and driving execution across multiple engineers or teams in a complex cross-functional environment.
- Proven ability to hire, coach, and develop engineers while maintaining high standards for technical quality and operational excellence.
- Proven ability to partner across organizations, align stakeholders, and improve reliability, delivery predictability, and engineering effectiveness for business-critical systems.
- Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field
Preferred qualifications
- Experience leading or owning large-scale CI/CD and build systems, including monolith or monorepo environments, with a focus on reliability, performance, and developer experience.
- Proven ability to run operationally critical platforms, including incident response, on-call leadership, observability, and cross-org escalation.
- Track record of cross-team collaboration and influence, working with application owners and platform teams to drive best practices and paved paths.
- Familiarity with test infrastructure and quality challenges at scale, including diagnosing CI failures and reducing flaky tests.
- Experienced people manager able to balance execution, operational stability, and long-term platform investment in complex, high-change environments.
- Experience driving strategy and execution across multiple dependent engineering teams.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes
- Experience recruiting and retaining healthy teams, managing performance, and calibrating expectations
- Experience working remotely and collaborating with distributed teams.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and hardware devices. Best known for its Windows operating systems, Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and Xbox gaming consoles, the company has expanded heavily into enterprise cloud computing via Azure and advanced artificial intelligence solutions. As one of the world's most valuable public enterprises, it empowers individuals and businesses globally through innovative digital transformation.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 228,000+ employees
- Founded
- April 4, 1975
- Location
- Redmond, Washington, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Vice Chair and President
Recent coverage
GeekWire
Microsoft unveils tools to monitor and corral rogue AI agentsOctober 19, 2026
Futurum Group
Microsoft Expands Sovereign Cloud Capabilities Across Public and Private EcosystemsOctober 20, 2026
BGR
Microsoft asks certain Xbox Series X/S owners to sell consoles back to Best Buy amid component cost pressuresOctober 20, 2026