Sr Principal Architect : Ads Platform
Microsoft · Posted Oct 14
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
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About the role
Microsoft Advertising makes billions of decisions every day across search, native, shopping, display, audience, and AI-powered advertising experiences. The team owns Ads Quality, turning incomplete, delayed, noisy, or changing evidence about ads, landing pages, advertisers, businesses, account history, and behavioral patterns into systems that are accurate, scalable, measurable, and continuously improving. This hands-on Principal Software Architect role spans distributed systems, production AI, decision systems, entity intelligence, agentic workflows, and measurement, and will define the long-term technical architecture for Ads Quality at global scale.
What you will do
- Define the long-term architecture for Ads Quality across signals, entity understanding, model execution, decisioning, feedback, and measurement.
- Establish how quality systems should reason across ads, landing pages, advertisers, businesses, relationships, and behavior over time.
- Design architectures that support heterogeneous AI systems including lightweight models, multimodal models, LLMs, agents, and deterministic systems.
- Define how evidence, model outputs, confidence, calibration, thresholds, and decision policies come together in production.
- Set technical direction across real-time, nearline, and offline systems, balancing quality, latency, freshness, cost, and reliability.
- Drive convergence where common abstractions create leverage and challenge unnecessary duplication or complexity.
- Partner with Applied Science on how new model capabilities should shape system architecture.
- Prototype difficult ideas when that is the fastest way to establish technical feasibility.
- Influence implementation through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on engagement with critical systems.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, or equivalent technical depth.
- Deep experience architecting large-scale production systems spanning multiple teams.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, production AI/ML systems, decision systems, or large-scale data platforms.
- Strong understanding of model serving, experimentation, evaluation, observability, rollout, and feedback loops.
- Ability to reason across software architecture and model behavior without treating ML as a black box.
- Track record of simplifying complex systems and turning ambiguous technical problems into durable architecture.
- Ability to influence senior engineers and technical leaders across organizational boundaries.
- Experience with advertising, quality systems, entity intelligence, multimodal AI, agentic systems, behavioral systems, or large-scale inference is valuable.
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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