OverviewMicrosoft 365 carries a large share of the world's business communication, and almost none of it reaches a mailbox without passing through Substrate Transport. We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to own a core area of that pipeline: to set its direction, define what we build, and carry the work through to an outcome that customers and the business can measure.
This role suits someone comfortable with depth. The problems are technical, the systems are hyper scale and long-lived, and the right answer usually depends on evidence you go and find yourself. In return you get genuine ownership of a service every Microsoft 365 customer depends on, and a team that expects you to lead rather than coordinate.
Substrate Transport is the engine that routes, filters, and delivers the messages that flow through Microsoft 365. Our mission is to move mail reliably, safely, and efficiently at planetary scale, and to give the workloads built on the platform they can depend on without having to reason about the plumbing underneath.
The team's scope follows the full path a message takes: submission and ingestion, routing and categorization, policy and compliance enforcement, hygiene and anti-abuse controls, and final delivery to a mailbox or an external destination. It also covers the connector and hybrid surfaces that customers configure themselves, the volumetric and throttling controls that keep the service healthy under load, and the continued modernization of infrastructure that predates the cloud era.
This position is based at the Redmond campus with 3 days per week work in the office and 2 days per week work from home. Domestic relocation assistance is available.
ResponsibilitiesYou will own a focus area within the transport pipeline from definition through shipped outcome, working alongside engineering leads, partner PM teams across Exchange Online and Microsoft 365, and the service engineers who keep mail flowing every day.
Define the productSet the strategy and roadmap for your area of the pipeline, grounded in customer promises rather than in a feature list. Write the specs that engineering builds from, state the hypothesis each investment is testing, and say plainly how you will know whether it worked.
Align the business and technical strategy for the area, including how it fits the broader Substrate and Microsoft 365 direction, and make the trade-offs between short-term relief and the long-term architecture the service needs.
Drive executionRun your area through the full engineering lifecycle: scope, safe rollout, telemetry, and the operational readiness a service of this size demands. Anticipate the dependency that will slip before it slips, and hold a mitigation ready when it does.
Carry security, privacy, compliance, and accessibility obligations as part of the definition of done rather than as a late review gate, and make sure changes to mail flow are validated before they reach customers at scale.
Own the outcomeOwn one or more service or business metrics for your area and build the roadmap that moves them. Go directly to the telemetry, message traces, and large-scale data the service produces, and use both the quantitative and the qualitative signal to frame the problem before proposing a solution.
Represent the area to leadership, to partner teams, and to customers, simplifying a complex system enough for a decision to be made without flattening the detail that matters.
Lead the team around youRaise the bar for how the team works: sharpen other people's specs with real feedback, mentor less experienced product managers, and establish patterns your teammates choose to copy because they make the work go faster.
Resolve problems that need cross-organizational alignment, securing commitment from teams that do not report to you and that may not share your goals.
QualificationsRequired/minimum qualifications:- Bachelor's Degree AND 5+ 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:- Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
- 2+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).
- 4+ 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).
- 4+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).
- Five or more years in product management, or equivalent experience in engineering, systems, or technical program management with direct ownership of a product area.
- A track record of taking a technical product or service area from definition through a shipped, measured outcome.
- Working fluency with distributed systems, enough to hold a credible design discussion with senior engineers and to know which architectural questions matter.
- Demonstrated use of telemetry and large-scale data to frame a problem and to prove impact afterwards.
- Clear written communication, from a specification an engineering team can build from to a summary a senior leader can act on.
- Direct experience with email or messaging infrastructure: SMTP, routing and delivery, deliverability, or anti-spam and anti-abuse systems.
- Familiarity with Exchange Online, Microsoft 365, or a comparable large-scale communications service.
- Comfort querying service telemetry directly, for example with Kusto Query Language, rather than working only from prepared dashboards.
- Experience with the compliance, security, or privacy obligations that come with a regulated enterprise service.
- A record of leading a cross-team initiative in which the critical dependencies belonged to someone else.
Product Management IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.
