Overview
The Office of the CTO (OCTO) for Microsoft is chartered with understanding, shaping, and accelerating technologies and their impact across Microsoft, industry, and society. OCTO leads investments in emerging technical bets, provides technical insights, and drives high-priority company-wide Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives, while partnering with our engineering, field, and strategy teams. As part of this, OCTO is responsible for Microsoft’s technical strategy for the use of OpenAI technology across Microsoft. OCTO operates as a high‑leverage organization – partnering deeply across engineering, product, research, and leadership to influence technical direction, execution integrity, and long‑term strategy.
We are seeking a Principal Technical Program Manager to lead complex, cross company initiatives that require technical depth, executive engagement, and the ability to drive clarity in highly ambiguous problem spaces. A successful candidate will bring strong systems thinking, influence without authority, and a track record of delivering durable outcomes at scale.
As a Principal Technical Program Manager in OCTO, you will operate at the intersection of strategy, engineering, and execution – shaping programs that cut across organizational boundaries and help Microsoft move faster, with greater coherence and responsibility.
At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.
Responsibilities
- Partner with engineering teams to validate ideas through prototyping and experimentation.
- Stay closely engaged with a wide range of services, platforms, frameworks, and hardware - across Microsoft, competitors, open source, and startups - to identify and prioritize top issues and opportunities in AI.
- Monitor internal and external research to surface cutting-edge investments and productization opportunities that advance Microsoft’s technical differentiation.
- Drive cross-organizational projects that align teams around a shared strategic vision. Partner with engineering leaders to evolve Microsoft’s culture of AI innovation through evidence-based practices.
- Develop technical reading materials for the CTO and senior engineering leaders, including summaries, highlighted focus areas, and prioritized reading sequences. Source materials may include academic research, business media, consultancy reports, internal white papers, demos, prototypes, and expert commentary.
- Deliver a range of research-based recommendations - from directional guidance and technical proposals to direct prototyping - tailored to the topic, scope, and complexity.
- Champion technical enablement by identifying and removing barriers to adoption of strategic technologies across engineering teams, ensuring alignment between strategy and execution.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree AND 6+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
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 12+ years experience engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.
- 1+ year(s) of experience reading and/or writing code (e.g., sample documentation, product demos).
- Track record of developing and launching successful AI products.
- Foundation in AI technical skills, such as understanding Machine Learning (ML)/Reinforcement Learning (RL), AI models, building AI services or products, as well as AI infrastructure, compute, hardware, and optimization.
- Possess analytical acumen, vigilant adaptability, and critical architect design for assessing AI infrastructure, hardware, compute capability, services and tooling to enable acceleration of our bold AI ambitions.
- Demonstrated history of engineering and product expertise with experience building AI services or products for customers and launching them to solve high value problems.
- Ability to handle high ambiguity, drive clarity, and identify/prioritize issues and opportunities among a wide variety of Stakeholders.
- Ability to communicate thoughts both verbally and in written form at the appropriate level of abstraction in a clear/crisp manner to Senior Leaders, including ability to escalate appropriately where needed.
- Be able to lead through influence, work across teams at scale, and feel confident engaging with Executives.
Technical Program Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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
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.
