Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Build the platform that makes every engineering team more effective!

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who combines deep distributed systems expertise with an AI-forward perspective to shape the next generation of our platform. Our ambition is to make building and operating software fundamentally simpler: turn complex infrastructure into intuitive capabilities, make reliability and security part of the default experience, and use AI to eliminate work that slows engineers down.

This is an opportunity to create impact beyond any single service or feature. The abstractions you design, the systems you build, and the engineering practices you establish will help teams deliver better products with greater speed and confidence. You will tackle challenging problems across scalability, performance, observability, and developer experience—while rethinking how intelligent automation can change the way a platform is built and operated.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will shape architectural direction, write production code, lead cross-team initiatives, and take ideas from early exploration through production adoption. We are looking for someone who questions established approaches, sees opportunities where others see operational overhead, and pairs ambitious thinking with the engineering discipline to deliver dependable systems.

If you want to build technology that amplifies the work of others—and help define what platform engineering looks like in an AI-enabled world, this role offers that opportunity.

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.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction. Define and drive a platform roadmap that connects long-term architectural investments with the most important needs of engineering teams and the business.
• Apply AI to meaningful engineering problems. Develop AI-assisted and agent-based capabilities for workflows such as troubleshooting, testing, migrations, and operational analysis. Establish evaluations and safeguards that make their results trustworthy.
• Treat the platform as a product. Work directly with partner teams to understand friction, validate solutions, and turn repeated challenges into self-service capabilities that engineers choose to adopt.
• Make safe delivery easier. Build automated validation, progressive rollout, observability, and recovery mechanisms that help teams move quickly without transferring unnecessary risk to production.
• Own outcomes end to end. Lead initiatives from problem definition and architecture through implementation, adoption, and ongoing operation. Measure success through developer experience, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Lead across organizational boundaries. Align stakeholders on priorities and technical tradeoffs, resolve ambiguous problems, and build shared approaches that enable teams to evolve independently.
• Raise the engineering bar. Stay close to code, mentor engineers, guide design reviews, and foster a culture of curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 designing, building, and operating distributed systems or shared platform services in production.
• Experience building platforms or developer tools adopted across multiple teams, with demonstrated improvements in engineering productivity, service reliability, or operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience integrating large language models or agents into engineering workflows, including tool integration, evaluation, permission boundaries, and human oversight.
• Experience designing interfaces and workflows that support both human developers and AI agents, with clear contracts, discoverable capabilities, and auditable execution.
• Depth in one or more platform domains, such as service frameworks, data infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, experimentation, configuration management, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience using telemetry, profiling, and production investigations to identify systemic bottlenecks and deliver measurable performance or cost improvements.
• Experience modernizing established systems through incremental architecture changes and migrations that preserve customer and partner confidence.
• A track record of balancing forward-looking exploration with pragmatic delivery, turning successful prototypes into supported, widely adopted platform capabilities.
• Solid systems engineering fundamentals, including API design, concurrency, data management, failure handling, and performance analysis.
• An AI-forward engineering mindset: ability to identify valuable applications of AI, write production code, lead difficult implementation work, and critically evaluate correctness, security, reliability, and cost.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on complex initiatives spanning multiple teams, including architectural decisions and delivery through production adoption.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements and developer needs into practical, maintainable technical solutions.
• Solid communication and collaboration skills, with experience explaining technical tradeoffs, influencing decisions, and mentoring engineers.
• #IC5Platform

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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.