Principal Group Engineering Manager
Microsoft · India, Karnataka, Bangalore ·
- Work mode
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Principal
- Category
- Management
- Experience
- 8+ years
Microsoft · India, Karnataka, Bangalore ·
Do you want to build the AI platform that trains the world’s most advanced models?
Join CoreAI, where we’re building next-generation systems for large‑scale reinforcement learning. Our platforms power the full lifecycle of cutting‑edge LLMs – from rapid experimentation to global production deployment.
On our team, you’ll play a pivotal role in making large‑scale post-training and reinforcement learning workflows faster, safer, and more reliable.
You’ll:
Build and evolve distributed services that underpin massive training runs
Improve iteration loops for researchers and engineers
Debug complex interactions between models and hardware
Apply advanced performance optimization techniques that directly impact product quality and operational excellence
Develop deep expertise in ML systems, AI infrastructure, and compute orchestration
Ship platform capabilities that enable mission‑critical AI workloads for customers around the world
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.
AI-Native Development
Provides technical leadership on the disciplined use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Holds team accountable for proactively taking responsibility for the content of their AI-generated requirements, design documents, code, and other assets, and assisting the rest of the team to do the same. Oversees team on incorporating Responsible AI practices into the SDLC to ensure appropriate controls over AI-generated assets. Provides leadership on intentionally applying SDLC and engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE framework, Engineering System Success Playbook [ESSP]) to guide improvements to processes and practices, especially those involving AI. Leads team on experimenting with AI tools and practices to improve their own capabilities, and providing recommendations on how to adopt them to others.
Coding
Oversees team members within and across teams on producing extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while accounting for and incorporating relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise on the coding and validation strategy. Defines or reuses quality metrics, best practices, and coding patterns to ensure testable code. Leads by example in best code-writing practices (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions). Oversees team on leading efforts to identify and anticipate blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalate them, and communicate how they will impact timelines, and then driving the identification and implementation of strategies and/or opportunities to address them.
Design
Oversees team and efforts, influences, and holds ownership of efforts and design discussions for overall system architecture of entire products/solutions that are deeply complex and often ambiguous. Looks for opportunities to leverage and incorporate open-source, off-the-shelf components and/or preexisting, managed services as part of the design of products/architecture. Oversees team on owning the testing and exploration of various design options for entire products/solutions, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Owns creating proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and deeply complex proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations and owns design decisions and oversees the less experienced team members. Writes design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Proactively identifies and evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines and advocates for how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Provides technical and people leadership to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Holds teams accountable for upholding Microsoft's standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Guides teams on understanding the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through deeply complex data analytics and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Oversees team on reviewing deeply complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.
Engineering Excellence
Researches and champions new trends in best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code that is based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Keeps informed of and communicates new standards to ensure that the product development and scaling to customer requirements, and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises, and holds accountability for products that do not meet expectations.
Drives using of GenAI tooling (e.g., GitHub CoPilot) across their teams to enhance engineering productivity.
Implement
Oversees teams on driving multiple groups' project plans, release plans, and work items in coordination with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) across products. Develops the long-term project vision. Guides other teams on project estimation. Anticipates future goals to guide future resources. Reviews, implements, and recommends updates to resource management in response to changing context. Oversees teams on owning efforts to ensure required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning. Holds teams accountable for driving efforts to ensure project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Holds teams accountable for proactively driving efforts to ensure all code across multiple products/solutions is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents. Acts as an expert and oversees team on calculating adequate capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of complex solutions. Establishes standards for teams for ensuring efficient operation of a set of complex products and/or solutions after it is live. Holds teams accountable for driving the proactive establishment of rollback plans for a set of complex products and/or solutions.
Reliability and Supportability
Acts as an expert for others' operations of live site service and following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate complex issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Reviews systematic issues and ensure solutions. Ensures playbooks are logical and understandable. Establishes standardized processes and guides others that implement solutions and mitigations to issues impacting performance or functionality of live site services. Reviews and writes complex incident postmortem and presents insights that drive changes to reduce or eliminate incidents across teams. Leads team on and proactively improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests, and telemetry to make on-call better, and recommends user-facing support documentation and additional test coverage to reduce likelihood of future user-initiated incidents. Enables and may drive the enablement of secure operations, security monitoring, and integration with live site investigation activities. Leads team on identifying opportunities (e.g., lunch talks, automation, practices, tools) that can be leveraged to improve the live site experience and executing on them. Ensures comprehensive observability and monitoring is in place for all the services their team oversees, and advocates for the inclusion of automated incident response/open source tooling, mitigation, analysis, and self-healing in those services.
Required Qualifications :
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering and/or technical leadership experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Prior technical experience in cloud software development, reinforcement learning, post-training, and container workloads preferred.
Prior people management experience preferred.
Required:
Ability to debug, read code and work in a large codebase.
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.
#CoreAIIndiaHiring
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.