Principal Software Engineering Manager

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging & real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Our portfolio includes Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a global data culture.

Within Azure Data, the Usage Billing team builds the next-generation data platform for reliable ingestion, aggregation, and processing of usage emitted at high volume by Microsoft services, ensuring accurate and timely billing through internal Commerce systems. This is a mission-critical service built for scale, compliance, and data guarantees—leveraging world-class Azure real-time messaging, streaming, and analytics services to ensure critical billing usage data flows into revenue for Microsoft.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will have the opportunity to work with a breadth of Azure technologies to build a massively scalable, distributed, and resilient platform for Azure Usage Billing. You will:

• Lead the design, development, and validation of core platform components, ensuring service fundamentals around reliability, monitoring, security, performance, and engineering systems.

• Drive architectural decisions for complex distributed systems that power billing across all Microsoft services.

• Partner across Microsoft teams to shape the underlying design of shared components, ensuring alignment with the broader Microsoft ecosystem and long-term technical direction.

• Lead critical pipeline components that run all Microsoft billing workloads, providing unified and accurate usage reporting across Azure, Office, and other services. This work is highly visible, with direct impact on Microsoft’s revenue stream.

• Influence and mentor engineers across the team and organization, raising the bar for technical excellence, collaboration, and live-site culture.

Come join the Azure Usage Billing team to build the next-generation usage platform that powers billing for all Microsoft services and future external customers. Microsoft Azure is a fast-growing business, providing customers an on-demand, scalable platform with 200+ distinct capabilities across 50+ regions. This role represents a rare opportunity to define and drive the new frontier of Microsoft’s billing infrastructure—enabling auditing, automated verification and reconciliation, analytics, and beyond.

At Microsoft, we don’t just value differences—we seek them out and invite them in, so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. The result is stronger teams, better products, and better outcomes for our customers.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years experience in software development, architecture/design, data modeling or data engineering work
  o OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 10+ year(s) experience in software development, architecture/design, data modeling or data engineering work o OR equivalent experience
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a multidisciplinary team, including Software Engineers, Program Managers, Security experts
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed cloud services with strong focus on reliability, scalability, and performance
Strong operational discipline with the ability to manage live-site health, respond to randomization, and consistently deliver high-quality outcomes

• This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cldoud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter

• Build cloud scale products with focus on efficiency, reliability and security
• Build and maintain end-to-end Build, Test and Deployment pipelines
• Contribute to the architecture & design of the products
• Triaging issues and implementing solutions to restore service with minimal disruption to the customer and business. Perform root cause analysis, trend analysis and post-mortems
• Drive initiatives, own features and lead the feature delivery along with the team
• Owning the components and driving them end to end, all the way from gathering requirements, development, testing, deployment to ensuring high quality and availability post deployment
• Embody our culture and values