Job Category:Software Engineering: Program Management
Location:Bellevue, WA, US
Job ID:820637-100730
Division:Online Services Division
Since Bing launched in June of 2009, the search world has changed for the better. We’re helping people break free from search overload and enabling them to make decisions with Bing’s powerful, friendly tools. We’re attracting new users and changing how people think about Microsoft and Search. We have a long road ahead and we need your help! Key to our continued success in this hypercompetitive space is taking enormous volumes of data and turning them into useful, actionable information to drive increased user engagement through great Bing features and improvements. We’re talking petabytes of data about how searches succeed, how they fail, and how we can improve Bing and our partner properties like maps, commerce, travel, and more.

As part of the Bing team within the Online Services Division, we are at the forefront within Microsoft in terms of having a very dynamic and agile work environment, competitive with the best of the online industry. Most of our teams ship new code every two weeks on a regular cadence. As part of the Search Platform team, we support many partners across OSD and Microsoft, which means we have multiple partners releasing every day of the week. And, given that we have development teams across the globe, our partners even ship around the clock and on weekends.

We are looking for an experienced and proven Release Manager to join our team. This person will be responsible for engaging with our partners across multiple platform technologies (our core middle tier platform - XAP, and high performance online back-ends such as Odyssey and Object Store), as well as in relation to server allocation and capacity management. We need someone who can establish a good communication framework with partners, coordinate their releases and track their issues with the platform teams, be responsible for broad announcements and timelines, as well as rollout and execute plans for breaking changes, major technology rollouts, and hardware changes. We are looking for the Release Manager to set up best practices for one-to-many engagements with partners, such as online forums, and be able to ensure that communication and information rollouts are effective in terms of reaching our partners. The Release Manager will also work with the platform Development Managers and PM Leads to coordinate activities which affect partners.

Given the level and pace of activity in this environment, we rely on tools and automation as much as possible. This is the case as well for Release Management, the person in this position should be comfortable in defining requirements, specifications, and outlining functionality needed for new tools to assist in their job, enabling them to better scale to an increasing number of partners. Ability to create sites and develop with Sharepoint is a plus.

The ideal candidate would have driven multiple releases of large products, have proven engagement with multiple partners or feature teams, have great communication and people skills, and be able to understand, at least at a high level, technical architectures and dependencies. Prior experience with online services would be highly valuable. The online services world brings a new set of challenges in terms of how teams plan and operate, so candidates should be comfortable working in an environment with a great level of uncertainty and changing priorities. Online services is the future, and you get to be a part of it and set in place the best practices and a role model for other teams at Microsoft and across the industry.

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