Backend Engineer II

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

9h • $102,100 - $219,200

About The Position

The Backend Engineer II works on Microsoft’s Messaging Platform team, which supports backend services serving hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer users across Teams and Copilot. The engineer independently applies AI tools and practices throughout the software development lifecycle, collaborates with stakeholders to understand customer and user requirements, and builds reliable, secure, scalable backend messaging services and features.

The role includes writing and reviewing maintainable code, developing test strategies and executing test plans, contributing to architecture and design decisions, and using debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions and prevent incidents. The engineer contributes to deployment automation, security and compliance practices, service reliability, on-call support, and continuous improvements to observability and operational readiness. The position also works with partner teams and stakeholders to plan releases, validate end-to-end behavior, respond to live-site issues, and incorporate customer feedback.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 2+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C# or Java, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 3+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C# or Java, or equivalent experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 5+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C# or Java, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Use AI tools and practices across design, coding, testing, code review, and incident investigation; review AI-generated changes and take responsibility for them.
• Write and reuse extensible, maintainable code for messaging services and features, considering diagnosability, reliability, concurrency, ordering, and idempotency.
• Use debugging, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions; conduct incident retrospectives, identify root causes, and prevent recurrence while protecting privacy and applying least-access principles.
• Review product and test code for correctness, test coverage, security, compliance, and maintainability; use automated code analysis and provide useful feedback to peers.
• Review and comment on architecture proposals for globally distributed messaging systems, explore design options and trade-offs, and own some design decisions.
• Help ensure designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, cost, security, privacy, and compliance requirements at scale; contribute to design documents and coordinate platform dependencies with partner teams.
• Create test strategies and execute plans, including security testing and negative cases; design for testability and use AI tools for test automation.
• Contribute to deployment automation and validate code in non-production and production-like environments.
• Apply security best practices and security-as-code invariants; contribute to security review standards, deployment gates, scanners, and monitoring, and work with security partners on threat models, premortems, breach drills, and incident response.
• Coordinate with partner teams before go-live to establish end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, performance and scalability validation, and DRI escalation paths.
• Follow security, privacy, safety, accessibility, and regulatory processes; maintain evidence of compliance such as audit trails and account for messaging-data requirements including retention, eDiscovery, data residency, and sovereign clouds.
• Apply secure design practices to build services that scale with customer demand and meet performance expectations and security commitments.
• Improve availability, reliability, efficiency, and observability; share knowledge, identify engineering-tool gaps, and responsibly reuse open-source or internal code.
• Work with TPMs and stakeholders to review work items, execute project and release plans, break work into estimated pieces, raise schedule risks, and account for security, privacy, and compliance protections.
• Ensure code is flighted behind feature flags, consider capacity and disaster recovery, plan efficient operation after launch, and contribute to rollback plans.
• Follow safe deployment practices across rings and regions with managerial guidance; monitor dependency versions and contribute to infrastructure for testing private builds in production-like environments.
• Run feature-flagged experiments and work with Data Science and PM to define success and guardrail metrics.
• Contribute logging, instrumentation, telemetry, dashboards, and alerts for performance, reliability, availability, usage, safety, issue detection, and security investigation while considering privacy impacts.
• Participate in on-call rotations, mitigate service issues securely with minimum required permissions, escalate appropriately, and improve troubleshooting guides, wikis, tests, and telemetry.
• Act as a designated responsible individual (DRI), monitor for service degradation or interruption, respond within the SLA, keep stakeholders informed, and escalate to appropriate owners.
• Work with PM, privacy and security experts, and technical leads to understand customer requirements; incorporate quantitative and qualitative customer feedback into designs and fixes, and advocate for customer security and privacy.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the linked Microsoft careers page.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level