Search Platform is the retrieval and grounding foundation for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. Our shared services turn Microsoft 365 knowledge into trusted, permission-aware evidence through indexing, retrieval and ranking, and grounding. Product teams across Microsoft consume them through Microsoft Graph and Work IQ, and relevance teams ship quality on top of them. Every Copilot answer, search result, and agent action is only as good as the evidence behind it, so our job is to make every quality gain land faster, cheaper, and everywhere, and to prove it with data everyone trusts.
We are looking for a Principal Product Manager on the Enterprise Search and Grounding Platform team to drive strategy and execution to deliver Copilot and Agents quality gains.
This position is based in Redmond, Washington and requires the employee be in the office a minimum of 3 days per week.
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
The strategy
Define the vision, multi-year roadmap, and success metrics for the Developer Experience pillar, anchored on the Search Platform north star: one trusted platform, tuned by scenario, with recall-forward, low-latency retrieval for agents.
Own product definition for the developer-facing API surface, including the next major version of our core retrieval API and the Work IQ and Retrieval API integration patterns, with a bias toward stable, scenario-agnostic contracts that outlive any single experience.
Decide what the platform should offer as a shared capability and what stays with individual agent teams, and drive the consolidation of bespoke integrations onto supported patterns.
Make the platform easy to build on
Design the onboarding path for a new agent team, from first call to production: reference integrations, documentation, samples, and self-serve tooling that remove the need for a bespoke engagement.
Treat debuggability as a product requirement. Specify the observability, tracing, and diagnostics developers need to understand why a query returned what it did and to fix issues without escalating to the platform team.
Translate agent needs into platform requirements for recall, latency budgets, and evidence formats, working with the Quality Improvements and Frontier Platform Innovation pillars so that recall-forward retrieval tuned for agents ships as part of the core platform.
Lead across the organization
Author crisp specs, requirements documents, and program plans; drive execution across multiple engineering teams and owners; and communicate status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to leadership.
Represent Search Platform developer experience with senior stakeholders across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Graph, Work IQ, and partner organizations, landing decisions and aligning roadmaps.
Raise the bar for platform product management on the team by mentoring PMs and modeling data-driven, customer-obsessed decision making.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's 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:
- Significant experience shipping developer-facing platforms, APIs, or SDKs consumed by other engineering teams, including ownership of API design, versioning, and deprecation decisions.
- Demonstrated ability to define a platform strategy and land it across organizational boundaries, influencing senior engineering and product leaders without direct authority.
- Technical depth: comfortable with distributed systems and the trade-offs among latency, throughput, and cost, and able to engage credibly with senior engineers in design reviews.
- Track record of turning customer and developer feedback into prioritized roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
- Communicate with clear, narratives and actionable specifications to executive-level audience.
- Experience with search, information retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation, grounding, or LLM-based agent platforms.
- Experience serving both first-party and third-party developers, including documentation, onboarding, and developer support models.
- Familiarity with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph, or other enterprise data platforms with permission-aware access.
- Experience defining observability and diagnostics as a product surface, or operating platform scorecards and metrics.
- Prior experience as a software engineer.
#CAP #Copilot
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.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of experience in product, service, or program management or software development, or equivalent experience
- Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements
- Experience shipping developer-facing platforms, APIs, or SDKs, including API design, versioning, and deprecation
- Experience defining platform strategy across organizational boundaries and influencing senior leaders without direct authority
- Technical understanding of distributed systems and latency, throughput, and cost trade-offs
- Experience translating customer and developer feedback into prioritized roadmaps and measurable outcomes
- Clear communication through narratives and actionable specifications for executive audiences
- Experience with search, information retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation, grounding, or LLM-based agent platforms
- Experience serving first-party and third-party developers, including documentation, onboarding, and developer support
- Familiarity with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph, or permission-aware enterprise data platforms
- Experience defining observability and diagnostics as a product surface or operating platform scorecards and metrics
- Prior experience as a software engineer
Microsoft Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Microsoft and has not been reviewed or approved by Microsoft.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is presented as broadly competitive overall, with clear role/level/location variation and an emphasis on using posted ranges and band information for apples-to-apples comparisons.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are described as a standout, highlighted by a strong 401(k) match structure and immediate vesting, plus additional plan features for tax-advantaged saving.
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Parental & Family Support — Family-oriented benefits are portrayed as a meaningful strength, with substantial paid parental leave and added supports like back-up care and adoption/surrogacy assistance.
Microsoft Insights
What We Do
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.
