Senior/Principal Development Lead
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to run A/B tests with online users and innovate more quickly based on actual user response. Microsoft needs to shift the culture from planning the exact features to planning a set of possible features, and letting customers guide us”
-- Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect
Do you want to transform the way people build features in websites and online services? Do you want to have impact across multiple products and services such as Live, MSN, and Microsoft.com? Do you want to take an influential role in a strong senior team with huge growth potential? Do you want to be part of the Software+Services revolution? Then join the Microsoft Experimentation Platform team.
The Experimentation Platform enables product teams to radically improve their offerings using controlled experiments with live users. The platform allows testing new ideas quickly using the best-known scientific method for establishing causality between a feature and its effects: randomized experimental design. The methodology is to expose a percentage of users to a new variation of the website or service, measure the effect on the business, and run statistical tests to determine whether the difference in metrics were caused by the change. Experimentation encourages more agile design and release cycles and can transform the way websites and online services are developed. We have been involved in multiple experiments where radical ideas led the introduction of features worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The platform is to initially enable experimentation everywhere Microsoft has an online presence, whether website or services, then to take experimentation to the developer ecosystem.
As the development lead, you will be responsible for leading the development of a highly-scalable, highly-available platform, comprising of services to conduct experiments, and software to analyze the data, yielding insight through statistical and data mining techniques. Entrepreneurial spirit, ability to attract and mentor top talent, and technical leadership skills are important. You must have very high standards for quality, customer focus, and trustworthy results because experimentation provides the safety net for others to try ideas.
Requirements:
Strong technical leadership and proficiency in architecture and design, preferably including experience in web services and databases.
Experience in leading a dev team, and growing SDEs
Strong track record of delivery
Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to successfully collaborate with test, program management, and other groups with cross-dependencies
At least 2-years of management experience
A CS degree or strong equivalent.
Energy and desire to deliver high-quality software quickly through agile development (we use Scrum)
Additional valuable experience
Background in Statistics and/or Machine Learning/Data-Mining
Database and analytics experience (OLTP/ETL/OLAP)
Help us bring the vision that Admiral Grace Hopper set: one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions
Please submit your resume to rkjobs at microsoft dot you know what or apply online at https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=4&jid=6127&jlang=EN