Principal Software Engineer

Overview

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.

Security represents one of the most critical priorities for our customers in a world of increasing digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We are building a security cloud that helps protect users, customers, developers, devices, and data across increasingly heterogeneous environments.

The Microsoft Purview team builds cloud services that power security, compliance, data governance, data loss prevention, and related experiences across Microsoft 365 and Windows. We build and operate global-scale services that transport, store, secure, and manage some of our customers’ most sensitive data. We are looking for a deeply technical Principal Software Engineer who combines exceptional engineering judgment with a drive for results.

You will provide technical leadership within Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM), working across high-throughput, multi-tenant cloud services, large-scale distributed data processing systems, and AI-powered capabilities. As a Principal engineer, you will tackle our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, establish technical direction across teams, and translate that direction into meaningful customer and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for complex, high-scale systems. Drive architecture and design across distributed services, big data processing, and AI-powered capabilities, making sound technical tradeoffs across scale, performance, reliability, security, and cost.
• Lead complex initiatives across team boundaries. Identify dependencies, bring clarity to ambiguous technical problems, align engineers and stakeholders around solutions, and drive execution to measurable outcomes. • Raise the engineering bar. Lead by example across architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, security, reliability, performance, and maintainability. Use AI to accelerate execution and improve engineering outcomes.
• Solve systemic engineering problems. Identify root causes and architectural bottlenecks, develop durable solutions, and improve the reliability and operational efficiency of services at scale.
• Multiply the impact of other engineers. Mentor and coach engineers, lead design and code reviews, establish engineering patterns and standards, and help grow technical leadership across the organization. • Drive customer and business outcomes. Use customer signals, operational data, and engineering insights to prioritize investments and ensure technical work translates into meaningful impact.
• Collaborate across organizational and discipline boundaries and influence technical and product decisions across partner teams.
• Embody our Culture and
• Values

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline AND 6+ years of software engineering experience, OR equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering complex, large-scale production systems.
• Demonstrated technical depth in distributed systems, cloud services, large-scale data processing, storage, or big data platforms.
• Demonstrated experience driving technical direction and delivering complex initiatives across multiple engineers or teams.
• Strong coding and debugging skills in languages such as C++, C#, Java, Python, or equivalent.
• Experience with Azure cloud technologies and large-scale distributed data processing platforms such as Apache Spark.
• Experience designing or shipping AI-powered capabilities, including LLM-based systems.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and turn ambiguous problems into executable engineering strategies.
• Strong customer orientation, engineering judgment, and bias toward action and results.

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.

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