Senior Product Manager

Overview

Are you excited by the opportunity to shape how one of the world’s largest cloud platforms is managed and modernized? Do you want to apply AI and agentic automation to simplify complex engineering operations, accelerate modernization, and improve the reliability and efficiency of critical Microsoft 365 services?

Join the Microsoft 365 Core Product Management team and help define the next generation of intelligent control plane and operational experiences. The Microsoft 365 Substrate and Work IQ organization provides the foundational cloud platform that powers Microsoft 365 experiences used by hundreds of millions of people every day, including Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. We operate one of the world’s largest cloud-scale platforms, with a mission to deliver exceptional availability, reliability, performance, security, and engineering efficiency for some of Microsoft’s most critical workloads.

Substrate Management Plane provides the core platform capabilities that enable Microsoft 365 engineers to automate and orchestrate data center changes. Its control plane services support at-scale workflow execution, system of record for data center inventory, resource management, and service operations across a large and diverse fleet.

We are looking for a highly technical Product Manager to drive the evolution of Substrate Management Plane and its customer experiences. Your objective will be to identify high-friction operational and modernization scenarios and translate them into scalable platform capabilities using AI and agentic automation, making complex operations more self-service, predictable, and efficient.

In this role, you will partner with engineering leaders and service owners to apply AI and agentic automation to reduce investigation and support effort, automate repeatable engineering workflows, and reduce the need for bespoke coordination across teams for significant re-platforming and modernization efforts. Your impact will span foundational management plane services and high-value operational scenarios across service modernization, capacity, and incident support, with initiatives such as Azure convergence, regional readiness, .NET Core migration, and re-platforming to a container-based solution.

This is a unique opportunity to combine deep platform product leadership with AI-forward transformation, shaping how Microsoft 365 engineers operate and modernize services at planetary scale.

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

• Define and drive the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Substrate Management Plane, spanning multiple control plane services and the end-to-end experiences that connect these capabilities to Microsoft 365 engineering teams.
• Identify high-friction operational and support scenarios across capacity, incidents, troubleshooting, regional readiness, and service modernization, and translate them into scalable platform investments and AI-enabled experiences.
• Drive the application of AI and agentic automation to engineering operations, including intelligent triage, dependency and risk analysis, guided workflows, recommendation systems, and automation of repeatable support tasks.
• Define platform capabilities and experiences that make large-scale service modernization more automated, observable, and self-service, using efforts such as .NET Core migration and re-platforming to a container-based solution as priority scenarios.
• Partner with capacity, fleet, finance, and engineering teams to identify ways we can manage our budget and increase efficiencies.
• Improve service quality and supportability by using incident, telemetry, customer feedback, and operational data to identify recurring failure patterns, prioritize platform fixes, and create more effective self-service and automated support experiences.
• Define intuitive customer and operator experiences for management plane capabilities, working backwards from the needs of engineers, service owners, operators, and support teams who rely on the platform to execute and troubleshoot critical operations.
• Define and measure outcomes for Substrate Management Plane including reduced engineering toil and support burden, faster and more predictable modernization and operational change, and lower operating cost.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree AND 5+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
• OR equivalent experience.

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 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).
• Experience contributing to or delivering products, services, or platform capabilities for cloud services, distributed systems, developer platforms, workflow systems, infrastructure, or engineering operations.
• Experience working with engineering teams to translate customer, operator, or business needs into clear product requirements, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Experience using AI or agentic technologies, or demonstrated ability to identify and evaluate opportunities to apply these technologies to engineering workflows and operational scenarios.
• Experience owning a defined product or scenario area through discovery, requirements definition, delivery, adoption, measurement, and iteration.
• Experience coordinating cross-functional initiatives, managing dependencies, identifying risks, and driving decisions across engineering teams, partner teams and organizational boundaries.
• Ability to understand technical architectures and dependencies and collaborate effectively with engineers and architects on product requirements, tradeoffs, and delivery decisions.
• Experience using customer feedback, operational data, telemetry, or product metrics to identify problems, establish priorities, evaluate solutions, and measure results.
• Demonstrated product judgment, structured problem solving, systems thinking, and the ability to make progress when the solution path is not fully defined.
• Solid written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate product goals, requirements, tradeoffs, status, and results clearly to technical and business stakeholders.
• Customer-focused mindset with empathy for developers, service owners, operators, and support engineers, and an interest in simplifying complex engineering experiences.

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.

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.