Backend Engineer II

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

The Backend Engineer II independently applies artificial intelligence tools and best practices throughout the software development lifecycle, collaborating with stakeholders to understand customer and user requirements. The engineer builds and maintains backend messaging services, creates and executes test strategies, reviews code, and uses debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions and prevent defects. The role aims to automate production deployments and applies secure coding patterns and compliance practices. This position is part of Microsoft’s Messaging Platform team, which supports backend services for Teams and Copilot and serves hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer users. The engineer contributes to globally distributed messaging systems operating at the scale of billions of messages per day, addressing performance, scalability, resiliency, cost, security, privacy, and compliance. The role also supports live-service reliability, incident response, deployment safety, and ongoing improvements to service observability and operational readiness.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 2+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including 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 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 C# or Java, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Apply AI tools and practices across design, coding, testing, code review, and incident investigation; fully review AI-generated changes.
Write and reuse extensible, maintainable code for messaging services and features, considering diagnosability, reliability, concurrency, ordering, and idempotency.
Use debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions and prevent production issues; conduct incident retrospectives and implement preventive fixes.
Review product and test code for correctness, test coverage, security, compliance, and maintainability, using automated code analysis tools and providing useful feedback to peers.
Review architecture proposals for globally distributed messaging systems, explore design options and trade-offs, contribute to design documents, and own some design decisions with technical leadership from others.
Help ensure designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost requirements at messaging-platform scale, while upholding security, privacy, and compliance standards.
Identify platform dependencies and downstream interactions, and coordinate with partner teams where dependencies and validation overlap.
Create test strategies and execute test plans, including security and negative-case testing; design for testability and use AI tools for test automation.
Contribute to deployment automation, validate code in non-production and production-like environments, and apply security best practices and security-as-code invariants.
Contribute to security review standards, deployment gates, scanners, and monitoring; work with security partners on threat models, premortems, breach drills, and incident response.
Ensure AI safety features are in place for AI-powered capabilities and coordinate end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance, and DRI escalation paths before go-live.
Follow security, privacy, safety, and accessibility processes; maintain evidence of compliance and account for regulations affecting messaging data, including retention, eDiscovery, data residency, and sovereign clouds.
Work with TPMs and stakeholders to review work items, execute project and release plans, estimate work, and raise schedule risks while accounting for security, privacy, and compliance protections.
Ensure code is released behind feature flags; plan capacity, failover, backup and restore, disaster recovery, efficient operations, and rollback plans.
Follow safe deployment practices across rings and regions with managerial guidance, monitor dependency versions, and contribute infrastructure for testing private builds in production-like environments.
Run experiments using feature flags and flighting, and work with Data Science and PM to define success and guardrail metrics.
Contribute logging, instrumentation, and telemetry for performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety while considering privacy impacts.
Build dashboards and alerts that improve issue detection and security investigation; improve troubleshooting guides, wikis, tests, and telemetry for on-call support.
Participate in on-call rotations, keep the live service running, mitigate issues securely using minimum required permissions, and escalate appropriately.
Act as a designated responsible individual (DRI), monitor service health, respond within the SLA, inform stakeholders, and escalate to the 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.