Principal Architect

Microsoft • Mountain View, CA

1d

About The Position

Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP) builds and continually reinvents the technology behind Microsoft's Customer Service & Support and Customer Success Unit businesses. Within the Office of the CTO, ITP brings together product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners to accelerate customer outcomes and business growth. Its engineering organization works alongside strategy, delivery, and productivity teams across Innovation, Production, and shared Tech Ops.

The Principal Architect defines and drives the long-term architecture for business-critical products, platforms, and services. The role combines solution architecture and software engineering to translate business strategy, customer needs, product direction, and technology trends into coherent logical and physical architectures that teams can implement and operate at scale. It leads through technical expertise, judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries, mentoring engineers, prototyping solutions to difficult engineering challenges, and reviewing consequential architectural decisions.

The architect works from enterprise and ecosystem context through component topology and implementation detail, bringing clarity to ambiguity and grounding decisions in engineering reality. This includes design validation, prototypes, code and implementation reviews, operational data, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams. The role connects strategy to execution by defining platform direction, documenting architectural rationale, creating scalable standards, and partnering with teams to deliver architecture incrementally while protecting customers and business operations.

The successful candidate will keep architecture grounded in engineering: connecting strategy and design to implementable decisions, validating high-risk assumptions with evidence, and staying engaged through implementation, deployment, operation, and architectural evolution.

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 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 or code reviews, benchmarks, modeling, or direct work with engineering and operations teams.
• Ability to connect strategy, logical and physical design, and implementable engineering decisions, validate high-risk assumptions with evidence, and remain 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 a bachelor's degree in the same fields 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 communicating complex tradeoffs involving reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, and delivery speed.
• 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, including AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, and AI-driven testing and code review, and incorporating them into standards and golden paths.
• Experience using operational evidence such as telemetry, incidents, capacity, cost, security findings, and customer signals to assess architecture health and guide investments.
• 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 using 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, and 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 mechanisms to measure adoption and effectiveness.
• 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 across multiple teams.
• Experience defining a pro-code golden path and an instrumented 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 through 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, triage, quality bars, reviewers, decision records, escalation paths, and adoption and outcome measures.
• Lead reviews of consequential products and programs, documenting context, options, tradeoffs, risks, rejected alternatives, and follow-up.
• Help teams create logical architectures across domains, capabilities, bounded contexts, services, data flows, integrations, APIs, identity, security boundaries, and interaction patterns.
• Help teams create physical architectures across deployment topology, compute, storage, networking, data platforms, service placement, geographic distribution, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, capacity, and operational supportability.
• Coach teams in translating functional and nonfunctional requirements into architecture specifications and diagrams at enterprise, system, and detailed component levels.
• Help develop a pro-code golden path of supported languages, frameworks, platform services, templates, scaffolding, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Help develop an instrumented golden loop spanning local development, AI-assisted coding, code review, testing, building, deployment, monitoring, and feedback.
• Mentor software engineers, senior and principal engineers, and architects through design coaching, reviews, pairing, and career guidance.
• Prototype solutions to difficult engineering problems and validate high-risk designs through 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 risk.
• Define target-state architectures and sequenced transition roadmaps that preserve 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 architecture and decisions to engineering, business, and executive audiences, and build trusted relationships with senior leaders, customers, and partners.
• Represent the organization in strategic architecture discussions and contribute reusable intellectual property, technical guidance, and thought leadership.
• 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 the Microsoft careers website.

What This Job Offers

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