Principal Cloud Network Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

4d•$142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft is hiring a Principal Cloud Network Engineer to provide technical leadership as its AI infrastructure and global wide area network scale. The role shapes the strategy and architecture for testing, deploying, monitoring, and continuously improving network operating systems, features, configurations, and operational workflows across a global, multi-vendor environment. The successful candidate owns complex problem and solution spaces spanning teams and engineering disciplines. They define technical direction and durable engineering standards, lead high-consequence design decisions, and turn recurring operational problems into secure, measurable, scalable systems. A central focus is advancing AI engineering maturity through practical AI-assisted and agentic capabilities, with the evaluation, safety, observability, and human oversight needed for production use. The position provides leadership across network validation, live-site operations, network automation and CI/CD, reliability, and AI strategy. It also involves collaboration across engineering, operations, security, and vendor stakeholders, as well as mentoring engineers and establishing standards for engineering practices and service ownership.

Requirements

Doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field and 3+ years of technical experience in network design, development, and automation; or a master's degree in one of these fields and 4+ years of such experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of these fields and 6+ years of such experience; 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

Doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field and 5+ years of technical experience in network design, development, and automation; or a master's degree in one of these fields and 8+ years of such experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of these fields and 12+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
3+ years of experience delivering network designs into production and live-site accountability for a network.
1+ year of experience developing quality management programs.

Responsibilities

Define and lead end-to-end network validation strategies for network operating systems, routing features, hardware platforms, configurations, and automation services across unit, integration, virtual lab, physical lab, canary, and production environments.
Architect extensible, vendor-agnostic testing frameworks for control-plane convergence, data-plane behavior, failure recovery, scalability, performance, interoperability, upgrade and downgrade safety, and platform stability across multi-vendor networks.
Establish risk-based quality standards and release-readiness criteria, including test coverage, quality gates, regression requirements, reproducible lab environments, and reusable tests and safeguards informed by production incidents and defects.
Provide technical leadership during complex network failures and live-site incidents; use telemetry, packet captures, logs, protocol state, topology, and hardware signals to isolate issues, identify systemic patterns, and drive corrective actions.
Define and improve network operational readiness and reliability, including telemetry, alerting, service-level indicators, troubleshooting, rollback, post-deployment validation, capacity analysis, self-healing mechanisms, and secure escalation processes.
Architect and build network automation and CI/CD systems, including source of truth, intent and metadata as code, automated validation, progressive deployment, health gates, rollback, drift detection, reconciliation, and operational automation.
Lead technical work across teams, drive architectural decisions, align engineering, operations, security, and vendor stakeholders, mentor engineers, and establish standards for code quality, observability, testing, documentation, configuration management, and service ownership.
Define and execute an AI strategy for network engineering, applying AI capabilities to improve engineering efficiency, network operations, troubleshooting, automation, reliability, and measurable operational outcomes.