Principal Product Manager - Azure Speech (CoreAI)

Job description

**Overview** We are building the next generation of Speech and Voice AI capabilities for Microsoft Foundry, bringing natural, real-time voice experiences to agents and applications. Our technologies span speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS), speech translation, voice technologies, and real-time conversational AI. These capabilities enable developers and enterprises to build voice-powered agentic experiences across Microsoft products, partner solutions, SaaS applications, contact centers, and intelligent devices. We are seeking an **Principal Product Manager - Azure Speech (CoreAI)** to drive the go-to-market strategy, customer adoption, and growth of Speech and Voice AI businesses. This role sits at the intersection of product, customers, engineering, sales, marketing, and the broader AI ecosystem. You will help translate our technical innovation into compelling customer value and ensure that customer and market insights directly influence our product strategy. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day, we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day. **Responsibilities** **Drive product adoption and growth** - Own the outbound product strategy for Speech and Voice AI, with particular focus on real-time conversational and voice-agent scenarios. - Develop strategies to accelerate adoption, consumption, and business growth across enterprise customers, developers, ISVs, and strategic partners. - Identify high-value customer scenarios and turn early successes into repeatable adoption patterns. **Lead strategic customer engagement** - Engage directly with strategic customers and partners to understand their Voice AI and agentic AI requirements. - Help customers architect compelling use cases leveraging speech recognition, TTS, speech translation, real-time voice, LLMs, and agentic systems. - Identify adoption barriers and work across engineering, sales, and support organizations to drive them to resolution. - Build lighthouse customer engagements that demonstrate differentiated business value. **Shape product strategy through customer and market insights** - Establish a feedback loop between customers, the field, and engineering. - Translate customer requirements, competitive intelligence, and market trends into actionable product insights and roadmap recommendations. - Partner closely with inbound PM and engineering teams to ensure investments address the highest-impact customer opportunities. **Drive positioning and go-to-market** - Define differentiated positioning and value propositions for Microsoft Foundry's Speech and Voice AI portfolio. - Develop customer narratives, solution scenarios, demos, competitive guidance, and other field-enablement assets. - Partner with sales, marketing, developer relations, and field teams on product launches and adoption campaigns. - Represent Speech and Voice AI at executive customer briefings, industry events, conferences, and developer engagements. **Build the Voice AI ecosystem** - Develop partnerships with ISVs, system integrators, technology partners, and platform providers building conversational and agentic AI solutions. - Identify opportunities to expand the ecosystem around Microsoft Foundry and make Speech and Voice capabilities easier to discover, integrate, and adopt. - Work across Microsoft to enable Voice AI scenarios in first-party products and platforms. **Champion product excellence** - Advocate for experiences that are reliable, responsible, low-latency, scalable, and delightful for developers and end users. - Partner with engineering and research teams to communicate emerging capabilities in ways that resonate with customers. - Maintain awareness of rapidly evolving Voice AI, foundation model, and agent-platform technologies. **Qualifications** **Required/Minimum Qualifications:** - Bachelor's Degree AND 10+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development - OR equivalent experience. **Other Requirements:** Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: - Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. **Preferred/Additional Qualifications:** - 15+ years of product management, product strategy, business development, or related experience in enterprise technology. - Demonstrated ability to drive customer adoption and business impact for developer platforms, cloud services, or AI products. - Customer-facing capabilities, including experience working with senior technical and business decision makers. - Ability to translate complex technical capabilities into clear customer value propositions and business scenarios. - Proven ability to operate across engineering, sales, marketing, research, and partner organizations. - Experience with Speech AI, including speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), speech translation, conversational AI, or real-time communication technologies. - Understanding of Generative AI, LLMs, AI agents, and agentic application architectures. - Experience with cloud AI platforms, APIs, developer platforms, or AI infrastructure. - Experience building GTM strategies and driving adoption for emerging technologies. - Executive communication and storytelling skills. - Track record of influencing product roadmaps through customer, market, and competitive insights. Product Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: 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.**](https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html)