Principal Software Engineering Manager | Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform

Microsoft Advertising serves billions of ad decisions every day across search native shopping display audience and AI-powered advertising experiences. Trust & Safety is foundational to this marketplace: protecting users from harmful deceptive and low-quality content; protecting advertisers publishers and partners from fraud and abuse; and ensuring Microsoft Ads operates with strong policy privacy security compliance and regulatory integrity.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineering Managerto lead a key engineering areas within the Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform. This team builds platform capabilities for advertiser and domain intelligence AI-assisted investigation model serving decisioning enforcement human review observability and risk/fraud protection.

This role is for an engineering leader who can combine technical depth strong people leadership execution discipline and production judgment. The manager will lead a team delivering complex systems in close partnership with Applied Science Product Policy Security Privacy Compliance and partner engineering teams.

The larger platform scope includes:

• AI-powered Trust & Safety intelligencefor understanding advertisers domains websites landing pages business identities reputation provenance and policy/fraud risk.
• Deep Research Agents and AI-assisted workflowsfor advertiser investigation domain review evidence gathering policy reasoning reviewer assistance appeals and fraud analysis.
• Decisioning and enforcement systemsfor policy enforcement fraud detection abuse prevention advertiser risk scoring and marketplace protection.
• Model-serving and orchestration infrastructurefor LLMs SLMs wide & deep models ensembles classical ML heuristics rules and policy controls.
• Security Risk and Fraud systemsfor threats such as phishing malware cloaking account takeover payment abuse fake business identities compromised advertisers coordinated abuse and policy evasion.
• Human-in-the-loop audit and governance systemswith explainability reproducibility reviewability and compliance readiness.
• Measurement and observability systemsto track enforcement quality false positives false negatives latency cost drift reviewer burden advertiser impact and live-site health.

The ideal candidate has the technical credibility to guide architecture the management experience to build and grow a high-performing team and the operational discipline to deliver reliable platform capabilities in a complex high-integrity environment.

• Lead and grow a highly technical engineering team responsible for core areas of the Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform including advertiser/domain intelligence content moderation AI-assisted investigation decisioning enforcement human review observability and risk/fraud protection.
• Set technical direction and execution priorities across platform delivery quality reliability operational excellence and live-site readiness.
• Hire coach and develop engineers and technical leads helping them grow in architecture execution production quality ownership and technical judgment.
• Own delivery for major platform components across ingestion signal processing entity intelligence model serving content moderation decisioning enforcement audit and measurement.
• Partner with senior ICs architects Applied Science Product Policy Security Identity and partner engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable platform capabilities.
• Drive productionization of AI/ML and agentic capabilities with clear quality latency cost reliability & safety mechanisms.
• Deliver real-time nearline and batch decisioning systems for policy enforcement content moderation fraud detection abuse prevention advertiser risk scoring and marketplace protection.
• Evangelize the teams platform capabilities across Microsoft Ads and relevant Microsoft Trust teams helping partner teams adopt shared systems.

• Required Qualifications

  • Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
  • 8 years of EM experience leading software engineering teams including experience managing senior engineers technical leads & managers.
  • Experience leading engineering teams that build and operate large-scale production systems with meaningful reliability scalability latency correctness availability security and operational requirements.
  • Technical depth in one or more of the following areas: AI/ML systems model-serving infrastructure decisioning systems distributed systems data platforms workflow platforms risk platforms security platforms or Trust & Safety systems.
  • Experience partnering with Applied Science Product or cross-functional stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into shipped engineering systems.
  • Exposure to production AI/ML systems including one or more of the following: LLM-based workflows retrieval-augmented generation model orchestration automated reasoning human-in-the-loop systems AI-assisted operational tooling or agentic workflows.
  • Understanding of production requirements for AI or decision systems including evaluation observability quality measurement rollout safety fallback behavior latency/cost tradeoffs explainability governance and operational reliability.
  • Experience building high-integrity systems where decisions must be auditable reproducible explainable governed and secure.
  • Demonstrated ability to hire grow coach and retain strong engineering talent in complex technical areas.
  • Strong communication skills including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs risks execution plans and platform strategy to engineering science product policy and business stakeholders.

  Preferred Qualifications

  The candidate is not expected to have deep experience in every area below. Broader coverage across these areas is preferred especially where the candidate has demonstrated the ability to connect engineering execution platform architecture and production outcomes.

  • Experience in Trust & Safety Fraud Abuse Risk Security Ads Quality Marketplace Integrity Policy Enforcement or advertiser protection systems.
  • Experience with adversarial systems including phishing malware cloaking account takeover payment abuse fake identities compromised advertisers coordinated fraud and policy evasion.
  • Experience building or managing teams that build Deep Research Agents investigation agents reviewer-assist systems retrieval-augmented generation systems LLM-powered operational workflows or AI systems that produce grounded evidence for human or automated decisions.
  • Experience managing teams that build model-serving decisioning enforcement workflow or human-review platforms.
  • Experience with entity intelligence knowledge graphs web crawling domain reputation business identity resolution provenance evidence extraction or risk scoring.
  • Experience designing or operating human-in-the-loop review systems appeals workflows audit platforms policy reasoning systems or enforcement governance mechanisms.

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.

Required Experience:

Manager