M365 Core Platform | United States
Shape the platform & infrastructure strategy behind M365 and Copilot. This role takes on the hardest technical and strategic problems spanning storage, performance and scale, fleet and capacity, and LLM infrastructure, connecting decisions across the stack into a coherent platform strategy.
The M365 Core Platform team is hiring a Principal Product Manager to lead high-impact initiatives across Storage Fabric, Performance & Scale, Fleet & Capacity, and LLM API. This is a broad role for someone who can move fluidly across these systems, go deep quickly, and drive problems that do not fit neatly within a single team.
AI is changing how infrastructure needs to be built and operated. Demand moves at software speed while physical capacity moves at infrastructure speed. Models, hardware, and workloads change continuously. Storage, compute, GPUs, routing, caching, reliability, efficiency, and product policy are increasingly interconnected.
As a Principal Product Manager, you will take on a small number of the organization's highest-impact strategic problems at a time. You will develop the technical and product thesis, understand the system and its constraints, identify architectural choices and tradeoffs, align teams around a direction, and drive the work to measurable customer, capacity, performance, or efficiency outcomes.
This is an AI-first product management role. You will use AI agents, automation, data analysis, and rapid prototyping to investigate problems, test hypotheses, model tradeoffs, and accelerate decisions. The role requires systems thinking, technical depth, product judgment, and the ability to operate with significant ambiguity and autonomy.
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
- Lead strategic and technical initiatives spanning Storage Fabric, Performance & Scale, Fleet & Capacity, and LLM API, particularly where solutions require changes across multiple layers of the platform.
- Take ambiguous, high-impact infrastructure problems from first principles through strategy, architecture, roadmap, execution, and measurable results.
- Develop a system-level view of how storage, compute, GPU capacity, models, inference infrastructure, routing, caching, reliability, and product policy interact, and identify opportunities across organizational boundaries.
- Shape how M365 and Copilot scale, including workload portability, infrastructure utilization, capacity allocation, and reducing resources required per customer outcome.
- Connect demand, supply, workload characteristics, model efficiency, infrastructure efficiency, and economics to drive capacity and investment decisions.
- Identify architectural simplifications and platform investments that remove structural bottlenecks rather than repeatedly solving individual performance, capacity, or reliability problems.
- Use telemetry, experimentation, modeling, and AI-driven analysis to quantify opportunities, test hypotheses, and measure outcomes.
- Anticipate changes in models, hardware, workloads, and AI architectures and translate them into platform requirements and investment priorities.
- Work across engineering leaders, architects, product teams, and infrastructure organizations to establish direction and drive complex initiatives through execution.
- Define success metrics and communicate complex technical and economic tradeoffs to senior leaders in a way that enables decisions.
- Mentor PMs and technical leaders and raise the organization's ability to reason about infrastructure as an interconnected system.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's Degree AND 10+ 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.
- Bachelor's Degree AND 15+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
- 6+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).
- 8+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).
- 8+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).
- Experience leading ambiguous, high-stakes technical initiatives spanning multiple engineering organizations and technology layers. Technical depth in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, storage, compute, AI infrastructure, or large-scale online services, with the ability to reason across the broader stack.
- Experience defining platform architecture, technical strategy, or multi-year investment direction for large-scale infrastructure.
- Experience with LLM inference, model serving, GPU infrastructure, routing, caching, capacity management, storage, fleet management, performance engineering, or resource optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to use telemetry, experiments, workload data, and economic models to guide technical and investment decisions.
- A record of improving performance, scalability, reliability, infrastructure efficiency, capacity utilization, or cost through product or technical leadership.
- AI fluency, including using AI agents, automation, and prototyping to accelerate analysis, technical exploration, and product work.
- Solid systems thinking and the ability to develop a technical point of view from incomplete information, pressure-test it, and drive an organization toward decisions.
- Exceptional cross-organizational leadership and executive communication skills, with the ability to influence senior technical and business leaders without direct authority.
Product Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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 10+ years of experience in product, service, or program management or software development, or equivalent experience
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements
- Pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter
- Bachelor's degree and 15+ years of experience in product, service, or program management or software development, or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market
- 8+ years of experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market
- 8+ years of experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience
- Experience leading ambiguous, high-stakes technical initiatives across multiple engineering organizations and technology layers
- Technical depth in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, storage, compute, AI infrastructure, or large-scale online services
- Experience defining platform architecture, technical strategy, or multi-year investment direction for large-scale infrastructure
- Experience with LLM inference, model serving, GPU infrastructure, routing, caching, capacity management, storage, fleet management, performance engineering, or resource optimization
- Ability to use telemetry, experiments, workload data, and economic models to guide technical and investment decisions
- Record of improving performance, scalability, reliability, infrastructure efficiency, capacity utilization, or cost through product or technical leadership
- AI fluency, including using AI agents, automation, and prototyping to accelerate analysis, technical exploration, and product work
- Systems thinking and ability to develop and pressure-test technical viewpoints from incomplete information
- Exceptional cross-organizational leadership and executive communication skills
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
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