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 enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale. The team's work spans service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management, collaborating with AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams. As a Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure, the role provides technical leadership across the organization, owning system architecture and guiding large-scale initiatives that produce reusable platforms for Microsoft's products and AI services.
What you will do
- Oversee and own the architecture of deeply complex and ambiguous products and solutions, evaluate design options and trade-offs, and align technical decisions with customer, business, and long-term platform outcomes.
- Drive innovation and delivery across multiple large-scale initiatives, guiding teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization.
- Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code that can be reused across the organization while meeting performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, security, compliance, and cost requirements.
- Establish and champion company-wide coding, testing, architecture, and operational standards; provide technical leadership in reviews and mentor engineers and technical leaders.
- Act as a technical authority for cross-product debugging, verification, telemetry, incident learning, repair actions, and automation that targets zero-touch deployment and prevents recurrence.
- Build alignment across teams, customers, and technical leadership; negotiate dependencies and trade-offs, hold stakeholders accountable for commitments, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.
- Influence open-source projects and industry practices, evaluate emerging technologies, and advance layered security, privacy, safety, and strategic compliance across complex products.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check
- Microsoft Background Check
Preferred qualifications
- Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ 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 architecture and technical leadership for multiple large-scale distributed systems, databases, analytics systems, or platform product areas.
- Experience aligning technical decisions with business outcomes and influencing cross-functional teams and senior technical leadership.
- Experience developing systems with languages such as Java, C++, or Rust and applying concepts such as query execution, indexing, concurrency, distributed algorithms, or data structures.
- Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in open-source project management and governance.
- Experience building interactive services, analytics interfaces, data infrastructure, compute infrastructure, or other large-scale platform systems.
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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