Principal Product Manager - Xbox Performance

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Join Team Xbox and help shape the future of gaming on Windows. We’re on a mission to empower players to play the games they want, with the people they want, anywhere they want, across PC, handhelds, and beyond. We are seeking a Principal Product Manager to own and drive Performance Engineering for the Xbox Platform Team to support the gaming device product roadmap including consoles, handhelds, and PCs. This role is accountable for defining performance requirements, building predictable and repeatable performance infrastructure, and establishing a rigorous, automated performance validation and reporting model that scales with our device roadmap. Operating at the intersection of platform engineering, OS, hardware, and developer experience, this leader will establish performance as a first‑class product requirement, shaping platform roadmaps, driving cross‑org alignment, and influencing architectural and investment decisions across Xbox and Windows.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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).
10+ years of technical program management experience shipping products/services
5+ years of Performance Engineering experience
Proficient technical depth in low level systems performance, operating systems, and performance measurement at scale, able to engage credibly in architectural discussions.
Track record of building durable infrastructure, processes, and operating models.
Experience working with gaming platforms, graphics intensive workloads, or developer performance requirements strongly preferred.
Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to influence strategy and decisions through data driven insights.

Responsibilities

Own the long‑term performance vision and strategy for Xbox platforms, aligning console, and device roadmaps with gaming‑specific performance expectations on Windows.
Define platform level performance requirements and success metrics for core gaming scenarios, ensuring consistency across hardware generations, operating systems, and form factors.
Act as the single accountable owner for performance readiness across the Xbox platform, influencing prioritization and tradeoffs at senior leadership levels.
Establish and own a standardized, scalable performance infrastructure that delivers predictable, repeatable performance workloads across representative hardware and OS configurations.
Drive architectural alignment across engineering teams to reduce variance, improve signal quality, and eliminate one‑off or ad-hoc performance testing approaches.
Ensure performance systems scale with platform complexity, supporting consoles, handhelds, and future device categories.
Establish durable operating mechanisms that sustain performance quality beyond individual releases.
Own weekly and milestone‑based performance reporting, delivering clear, decision‑ready insights to senior leadership.
Build and maintain performance scorecards that track trends, risks, and progress across OS releases, device generations, and gaming scenarios.
Influence architectural and roadmap decisions through deep technical understanding of OS internals, performance measurement, and gaming workloads.
Raise the bar for performance rigor across the Xbox organization by defining standards, expectations, and best practices adopted at scale.