Principal Product Manager

This role is part of the Microsoft AI Team. The MAI Team mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. As team members, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals.  

MAI is a startup-like team inside Microsoft, created to push the boundaries of AI toward Humanist Superintelligence — ultra-capable systems that remain controllable, safety-aligned, and anchored to human values. Our mission is to create AI that amplifies human potential while ensuring humanity remains firmly in control. We aim to deliver breakthroughs that benefit society — advancing science, education, and global well-being.

Candidates that thrive at MAI 

• Hold an exceptionally high bar for delivering excellence in every task  

• Are able to balance speed and quality even when delivering ambiguous or emerging goals  

• Bring ambitious bias for action, push boundaries, and take ownership   

• Keep things simple  

• Deeply and authentically value teamwork  

• Maintain an optimistic, humble, can-do attitude to all tasks, big and small 

• Own and deliver the model roadmap: Define the roadmap in collaboration with key stakeholders. Understand and navigate tradeoffs quickly and strategically. Balance quality with speed. Drive continuous progress through ambitious and energized product leadership.   

• Partner to build alignment: Work closely with partner teams to understand and translate their product needs into model requirements.  

• Define model evaluations: Take a scientific, data-driven approach to product success. Build relevant benchmarks that enable us to climb to frontier quality on the tasks that matter for the product.   

• Determine launch readiness: Establish clear criteria for model launches. Own the go/no-go decisions that balance capability, risk, and product goals. Ensure strong alignment and transparent, regular communication throughout the launch process. 

• Stay at the frontier: Track the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Translate what you learn into actionable product priorities. 

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
  • OR equivalent experience.

Additional/Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework).
• 6+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).
• 6+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product).
• 5+ experience defining product requirements for AI models and driving decisions and execution across multiple senior level stakeholders.
• 5+ years direct, hands-on collaboration with model researchers and ML engineers in areas such as model training, evaluation, computing infrastructure, agentic and reasoning models, where you can point to your concrete contribution.  
• Proven ability to ship best-in-class AI models or AI enabled products in a fast-paced, competitive environment.
• Demonstrated ability to understand and reason with precision through the technical and commercial drivers required to determine a Go to Market (GTM) strategy for new AI products. 
• Proven ability to bring successful models, agents, or native AI products to market by deeply engaging with customers and developers across different verticals.