Principal Architect

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

5d • $165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP) builds and continually reinvents technology for Microsoft's Customer Service & Support and Customer Success Unit businesses. Within the Office of the CTO, ITP works across product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners to accelerate customer outcomes and business growth. Its engineering organization supports innovation and production, with shared Tech Ops.

The Principal Architect defines and drives long-term architecture for business-critical products, platforms, and services. Combining solution architecture and software engineering, the role translates business strategy, customer needs, product direction, and technology trends into logical and physical architectures that teams can implement and operate at scale. The architect leads through technical depth, judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries; mentors engineers; prototypes solutions to difficult engineering problems; and reviews consequential architectural decisions.

This is a hands-on, high-impact technical leadership role connecting strategy to implementation. The architect defines platform direction, documents decisions and standards, and partners with teams to deliver architecture incrementally while protecting customers and business operations. The role remains engaged through design validation, implementation, deployment, operations, and continued architectural evolution, using evidence such as prototypes, code and implementation reviews, operational data, and collaboration with product and engineering teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, 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.
• Hands-on technical experience sufficient to validate designs through prototypes, implementation reviews, code reviews, benchmarks, modeling, or direct work with engineering and operations teams.
• Ability to connect strategy, logical design, and physical design to implementable engineering decisions, validate high-risk assumptions with evidence, and stay engaged through implementation, deployment, operation, and architectural evolution.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience; or a bachelor's degree in the field and 15+ years of such experience, or equivalent experience.
• Extensive experience defining logical and physical architectures for large-scale, business-critical enterprise products, platforms, cloud services, or distributed systems.
• Demonstrated success defining future-state architecture and delivering multi-year transformation or modernization roadmaps across multiple engineering teams or organizational boundaries.
• Experience establishing and governing architecture principles, design standards, reference architectures, patterns, guardrails, architecture decision records, and technical review practices.
• Deep understanding of software and distributed-systems design, including service boundaries, APIs, integration patterns, data architecture, identity, networking, deployment topology, resiliency, observability, and operational supportability.
• Experience translating business, customer, functional, and nonfunctional requirements into implementable architecture specifications, diagrams, decisions, and sequenced delivery plans.
• Experience making and communicating complex tradeoffs involving reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence senior technical and business stakeholders across organizations without formal reporting authority.
• Demonstrated ability to embrace change, push boundaries, and continuously improve how teams design, build, and operate software.
• Experience applying AI-first development practices, such as AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, and AI-driven testing and code review, and incorporating them into golden paths and standards.
• Experience using operational evidence, including telemetry, incidents, capacity, cost, security findings, and customer signals, to assess architecture health and guide investment decisions.
• Deep expertise in one or more areas such as cloud platform architecture, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, AI systems, security architecture, networking, developer platforms, or large-scale service engineering.
• Experience modernizing mature or legacy environments through transition architectures, platform seams, domain decomposition, interface evolution, data migration, and incremental replacement strategies.
• Experience applying architecture methods and frameworks such as the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, TOGAF, domain-driven design, threat modeling, or similar practices.
• Familiarity with Microsoft engineering tools and services such as Azure, GitHub and GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.
• Experience designing platforms and products spanning multiple clouds, regions, regulatory boundaries, partner ecosystems, or heterogeneous technology environments.
• Experience with cloud-native and AI-era architecture patterns, including container orchestration, event-driven systems, API platforms, data and model governance, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and Responsible AI controls.
• Demonstrated record of anticipating technology shifts and turning emerging capabilities into pragmatic architecture strategy, standards, and investment recommendations.
• Experience developing architecture maturity models, conformance measures, quality scorecards, automated policy or standards validation, and adoption and effectiveness measures.
• Exceptional systems thinking, problem solving, negotiation, written communication, executive presentation, and technical storytelling skills.
• Experience building and leading an architecture guild, architecture review board, or similar community of practice that sets standards and raises engineering capability across teams.
• Experience defining a pro-code golden path and an instrumented inner and outer developer loop, including platform engineering, templates, scaffolding, CI/CD, AI-assisted development, and developer-experience measurement.
• Track record of mentoring software engineers and prototyping solutions to difficult engineering problems under production-relevant conditions.
• Relevant architecture or cloud certifications; these are beneficial but do not substitute for demonstrated architectural judgment and delivery impact.

Responsibilities

• Define, launch, and lead the ITP architecture guild, including its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms.
• Set and evolve architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technology choices, and guardrails.
• Drive AI adoption and transformation by defining AI-first reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails for agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI.
• Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, engineering, and product groups.
• Develop, run, and improve the architecture review process, including intake and triage, quality bars, reviewer pool, architecture decision records, escalation paths, and adoption, cycle-time, and outcome measures.
• Lead reviews of consequential products and programs, ensuring decisions document context, options, tradeoffs, risks, and rejected alternatives, and are understood, implemented, measured, and revisited.
• Help teams create logical architectures covering domains, capabilities, bounded contexts, services, data flows, integrations, APIs, identity, security boundaries, and user or system interaction patterns.
• Help teams create physical architectures covering deployment topology, compute, storage, networking, data platforms, service placement, geographic distribution, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, capacity, and operational supportability.
• Coach teams to translate functional and nonfunctional requirements into architecture specifications and diagrams from enterprise and system context through component, data, network, identity, and deployment views.
• Help develop a pro-code golden path: a documented, opinionated set of languages, frameworks, platform services, templates, scaffolding, and CI/CD pipelines for building and shipping software in ITP.
• Help develop an instrumented golden loop spanning local development, AI-assisted coding, code review, testing, building, deployment, monitoring, and feedback, with measurable velocity, quality, and developer experience.
• Mentor software engineers, including principal and senior engineers and architects, through design coaching, code and design reviews, pairing, and career guidance.
• Prototype solutions to difficult engineering problems and validate high-risk or novel design elements using working prototypes, benchmarks, modeling, simulations, and technical spikes.
• Contribute production-quality reference implementations, templates, and sample code for engineering teams.
• Identify architectural gaps, design cliffs, concentration risks, systemic dependencies, obsolete technologies, and technical debt, and prioritize investments to improve agility and reduce operational and business risk.
• Define target-state architecture and sequenced transition roadmaps that move from current to target state incrementally while maintaining compatibility, service continuity, and customer trust.
• Help teams balance reliability, security, privacy, safety, accessibility, performance, scalability, sustainability, maintainability, time to market, and total cost of ownership.
• Use telemetry, capacity and cost models, reliability data, security findings, incident learnings, customer feedback, and technology-market signals to assess architecture health and guide evolution.
• Communicate complex architectures and decisions to engineering, business, and executive audiences, and build trusted technical relationships with senior leaders, customers, and partners.
• Represent the organization in strategic architecture discussions and contribute reusable intellectual property, technical guidance, and thought leadership across Microsoft and the broader ecosystem.
• Embody Microsoft's culture and values.

Benefits

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

What This Job Offers

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