Senior Software Engineering Manager -MSAI at Microsoft

The Microsoft Search Assistant and Intelligence team is focused on improving key parts of Microsoft software and services, including the Microsoft Office 365 suite, using Machine Learning, Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing techniques. Our efforts leverage the entire breadth and depth of the Office 365 system – a distributed system with hundreds of thousands of computers tuned to empower our users by responding in milliseconds.

Responsibilities

• As a lead, you will be expected to coach, care and mentor a small team of engineers and or scientists working on tough problems with you. In addition to managing and growing the capabilities of team, your responsibilities will also include technical leadership. The expectation is that you will contribute to feature designs and long-term technology roadmaps. You will be responsible for ensuring that the work your team delivers is high-quality and developed in a way that aligns with architecture of the underlying platform.
• You will work with a team of applied scientists and developers who are responsible for all stages of the research & development cycle including early ideation, design, implementation and scaling it internationally. You will be expected to work on many levels - from high level vision, to design and implementations of both self-contained components and large, team-oriented code bases.
• Your responsibilities will include shipping large-scale backend services that host complex models and algorithms to process critical user data. You will also be involved in developing offline processes to monitor, extract, index and build ML & NLP models. Collaborating with other engineers to build demos and apps to showcase these services is one of the ways in which you will be able to contribute new ideas. The development process is driven by gathering implicit signals from real users through online experimentation to learn and iterate on the next improvements in the product.
• You will also have the opportunity to participate in frequent hackathons that allow you to work with many different teams around the world. The goal is to pursue high impact work to quickly deliver on critical areas that our users value, by delivering high quality features in a highly collaborative team environment.

Qualifications

Required

• You should have strong software design and development background with C#, C++ or Java (or similar languages like Python) with at least 5 years of experience. A BSc degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science (or related fields like Electronic Engineering, Physics or Mathematics) is required. 
• Proven experience in managing a team of engineers is desirable, however, passion for growing and nurturing a team of engineers will be even more important to allow you to succeed in this role. The lead role will still be technical, and your team will expect you to provide solid technical leadership and oversight.
• You must have strong programming and algorithm design skills and real passion for data driven decision-making. Proven experience working on large scale web services would help you get started, while experience or interest in natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, or data mining area are a big bonus.
• You also need strong verbal and written communication skills with excellent interpersonal communication and collaboration skills.

Prefered

• An MSc or PhD is not required, but a passion for continuously learning new skills and techniques is. As a lead, the expectation is that you will help your team learn and grow.