Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft · Posted Oct 1
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
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About the role
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Engineering Systems team at Microsoft builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that let teams develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale, spanning service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management. The team works alongside AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams to provide reliable paths from development to production. As a Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure, the role acts as a technical leader for multiple initiatives building large-scale infrastructure platforms, making architectural trade-offs, mentoring engineers, and influencing open-source technologies.
What you will do
- Drive innovation and deliver software at scale while ensuring architecture, implementation, deployment, and production operations meet reliability, security, compliance, performance, and cost requirements.
- Provide architectural guidance and mentorship across teams, and advance engineering craftsmanship through coding, testing, design, observability, and operational best practices.
- Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code that can be reused by other teams while accounting for operational impact and long-term maintainability.
- Serve as technical lead for multiple key initiatives, identify problems and opportunities, and guide teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization.
- Partner with teams, customers, and technical leadership to align perspectives, resolve dependencies and trade-offs, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.
- Participate in and influence relevant open-source projects, evaluate new technologies, and share knowledge and practices with broader engineering communities.
- Lead debugging, incident-learning, deployment automation, security hardening, and telemetry improvements that increase quality and reliability across complex infrastructure systems.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check
- Microsoft Background Check
Preferred qualifications
- Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Experience providing architectural or technical leadership across multiple complex engineering initiatives.
- Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or client-server architectures.
- Experience architecting data infrastructure, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), AI infrastructure, storage, graph, compute, or platform systems.
- Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in open-source project management and governance.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and hardware devices. Best known for its Windows operating systems, Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and Xbox gaming consoles, the company has expanded heavily into enterprise cloud computing via Azure and advanced artificial intelligence solutions. As one of the world's most valuable public enterprises, it empowers individuals and businesses globally through innovative digital transformation.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 228,000+ employees
- Founded
- April 4, 1975
- Location
- Redmond, Washington, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Vice Chair and President
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