Microsoft

Principal Product Manager, Platform Engineering

Microsoft$142K — $274K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years in product management or software development - OR equivalent experience.
  • Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build prototypes, tools, or shipped product.
  • Experience owning a developer-facing or platform product as the product owner.
  • Proven track record of making data-driven product decisions, defining metrics, and driving outcomes.
  • Technical proficiency to understand code and architecture, ensuring effective communication with engineers.

Responsibilities

  • Own the platform roadmap and prioritize development across multiple teams.
  • Define and instrument success metrics for platform adoption and report findings honestly.
  • Prototype and build dashboards and tools independently to test ideas and gather insights.
  • Manage the onboarding process, documentation, and developer relations to drive platform adoption.
  • Collaborate with architects and engineers to align on building priorities and technical implementation.
  • Engage with teams to learn about workflows, pain points, and how to enhance productivity.
  • Present clear evidence to leadership on the platform's impact and cost-effectiveness.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance options.
  • Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance.
  • Generous paid time off policy to encourage downtime and rest.
  • Access to professional development opportunities and resources.
  • Participation in employee stock purchase plans.
Full Job Description
Overview

Come build, from scratch, the AI-first developer platform that lets thousands of engineers ship faster and safer.

We're a new Platform Engineering team building an internal developer platform, golden paths, and the developer experience for the Microsoft engineering teams behind the world's largest and most complex commerce platforms. Empower the teams that build the copilots and agents that tens of thousands of sellers, partners, and support people rely on around the world every day - global scale and reach with unbounded opportunity to make meaningful impact. The mandate is real, and the appetite is there, from leaders and teams: take the KTLO and toil out of engineers' days, make safe deployment the easy path, and make agent-driven workflows the default for how we build.

We run the platform as a product - teams pick it up because it's useful, not because they're told to. What's open is the technical frontier: agents change what a platform can even do. A platform used to be bounded by what you could deterministically wire across systems, with the gaps left to people to glue by hand. Now agents can carry that ambiguous, cross-system work, and building greenfield, we get to work out how much more a platform can take on.

If you'd rather ship and learn than ask permission, and you're as curious about what teams and work become in this shift as you are about the tech itself, this is the rare seat where you get to define the thing, not just run it.
Why this role
  • You own the platform as a product. You own the whole product surface across the teams we serve: what we build, for whom, in what order, and what we don't. The architects go deep on individual designs; you own the roadmap and the priorities across the whole customer base.
  • You prove the platform is working. Adoption is earned here, so evidence is everything. You own the measurement: whether engineers are faster, and the honest answer when they aren't. You instrument it, and you tell the truth about it.
  • You're a builder, not a spec-writer. This is a hands-on PM seat. You prototype with agents, stand up your own dashboards and analyses, and ship. If you need an engineer to build every mock and pull every number, this isn't your seat.
  • You run the adoption engine. You own how adoption happens at scale: onboarding, docs, and the feedback loop that turns a platform teams could use into one they reach for first.


Responsibilities
  • Own the platform roadmap across the teams we serve: aggregate demand, set priorities, sequence what ships, and make the calls on what we won't build.
  • Own the measurement: define what "faster and safer" means, instrument it, and report the honest signal, including when the platform isn't earning adoption yet.
  • Prototype and build your own dashboards, tools, and analyses with agents and code, so you can test an idea or read the data without waiting on someone else.
  • Run the adoption motion: onboarding, docs, developer relations (DevRel), and the feedback loop that turns a useful platform into an adopted one.
  • Partner with the architects and engineers on what to build and why. You own the roadmap; they own the technical how.
  • Stay close to the teams we serve: learn their real workflows, where they lose time, and the business they're driving, and weigh the whole base fairly in what we prioritize.
  • Make the case to leadership and partner orgs with evidence: what the platform changed and what it costs.
What we're looking for
  • A platform-as-a-product PM who builds, a technical product manager at heart. You've owned a developer-facing or internal product, and you prototype and analyze yourself rather than delegating every artifact.
  • AI-native. You use generative AI and agents to build - prototypes, tools, analyses, shipped product - not slideware about AI.
  • Fluent with data: product analytics and experimentation. You define the metric that matters, instrument it, and stay honest when it says the thing isn't working.
  • Comfortable that adoption is earned, never mandated, and energized by earning it on the merits rather than assuming it.
  • Technical enough to earn engineers' trust: you can read the code, reason about the architecture, and hold your own with a senior architect on tradeoffs.


Qualifications

Required / Minimum qualifications
  • Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years in product 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.

Additional or preferred qualifications
  • Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development OR equivalent experience.
  • Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build (prototypes, tools, or shipped product).
  • Experience owning a developer-facing or platform product (an internal developer platform (IDP), developer tools, or developer experience / DevEx) as the product owner.
  • A track record of making product decisions from data: defining the metrics, instrumenting them, and driving the outcomes.

Come build the platform that makes every engineer ship faster - and help define what a developer platform even is in the age of agents.

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.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Learn more about Microsoft
Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
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