Principal Software Engineering Manager | Ads Trust & Safety AI Platform

Overview 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 Manager  to 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 intelligence  for understanding advertisers, domains, websites, landing pages, business identities, reputation, provenance, and policy/fraud risk. • Deep Research Agents and AI-assisted workflows  for advertiser investigation, domain review, evidence gathering, policy reasoning, reviewer assistance, appeals, and fraud analysis. • Decisioning and enforcement systems  for policy enforcement, fraud detection, abuse prevention, advertiser risk scoring, and marketplace protection. • Model-serving and orchestration infrastructure  for LLMs, SLMs, wide & deep models, ensembles, classical ML, heuristics, rules, and policy controls. • Security, Risk, and Fraud systems  for 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 systems  with explainability, reproducibility, reviewability, and compliance readiness. • Measurement and observability systems  to 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. Responsibilities • 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 team’s platform capabilities across Microsoft Ads and relevant Microsoft Trust teams, helping partner teams adopt shared systems. Qualifications • Required Qualifications • Bachelor’s 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.