The posting
Overview
Help shape how millions of people find what they need. Search sits underneath almost everything people do with Microsoft Copilot and inside our apps. It's how people find answers, files and context, and it's how AI agents find what they need to act, including when writing code. When search is great, people barely notice it. When it isn't, nothing else works. Our team's job is to make it great, and keep it that way.
We're looking for a Principal Product Manager who is equally curious about customers and technology. You'll build a deep understanding of how people use our products and where the experience delights or disappoints them. You'll combine customer signals, product telemetry and research into a clear picture, and turn that picture into action. You'll find the opportunities that matter most and make sure they move forward, whether that means helping an existing owner or taking on the work yourself and delivering it.
This role suits a builder PM who is comfortable with ambiguity and is equally at ease setting strategy and doing hands-on work. You might come from search, from AI, or from a customer-facing product role, and you need to have the technical depth to dig into how systems really work. Experience with search, retrieval or ranking or with agentic or AI-assisted coding tools is a plus. Curiosity, sound judgment and a habit of finishing what you start matter most.
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
Customer and Market Insight
- Anticipate customer needs. Combine quantitative signals (usage, telemetry, quality metrics) with qualitative signals (listening systems, feedback channels, direct customer engagement) to uncover unmet and unknown needs across Copilot and in-app search.
- Find the root problem. Spot patterns across customers and scenarios, connect them to known trends, identify who is affected, and size and prioritize the problem. Use evidence to influence what gets built.
Product Strategy and Definition
- Prioritize investments. Identify long-term, customer-informed investment opportunities. Evaluate tradeoffs with partners across the organization, and guide others toward the features and experiences that will deliver on objectives and key results (OKRs).
- Own the roadmap. Drive the roadmap for your areas across organizational boundaries. Prioritize the backlog, align with engineering on tradeoffs, identify dependencies, and resolve difficult tradeoffs with peers.
- Drive technology adoption. Keep evaluating emerging trends in search, retrieval and AI/ML, and champion their adoption into Copilot's core systems. Influence technical direction and quality standards across modalities and content types.
Embedding AI in Product Management
- Build AI systems for scale. Build AI-powered systems, agents and automated workflows that help the team scale how it analyzes feedback, evaluates sentiment and generates insights, combining AI output with human judgment.
Leadership and Collaboration
- Lead through influence. Bring engineering, data science, research and design partners around a common vision. Provide thought leadership, and be the person leaders turn to with hard questions about search and customers.
- Communicate with impact. Present technical strategies, results and recommendations to stakeholders, driving alignment and continuous improvement across the organization.
- Raise the bar for the team. Coach and mentor peers in framing problems and forming hypotheses, and help build an inclusive, collaborative culture.
Qualifications
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree AND 8+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development, OR equivalent experience
Preferred Qualifications:
- 4+ years of experience working training/evaluating search/information retrieval systems as Product Manager, Software Developer, or Data Scientist.
- Experience with search, retrieval, ranking or recommendation systems, and an understanding of how relevance and quality shape customer trust and engagement.
- Experience with agentic coding or AI developer tools.
- Experience delivering results through collaboration across disciplines, time zones, feature teams and partners, often without direct authority.
- Comfort working through ambiguity, with a habit of rolling up your sleeves and seeing problems through to completion.
#CAP #Copilot
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.
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.
