Principal Hardware Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d

About The Position

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) delivers core infrastructure and foundational technologies supporting Microsoft’s online businesses and Azure platform. The Hardware, Infrastructure Management, and Fundamentals Engineering (HIFE) team works to improve the planning, quality, delivery, scale, and sustainability of Microsoft cloud hardware. The team seeks a Principal Hardware Engineer to develop customer-focused technical solutions for managing and optimizing cloud infrastructure.

This role leads development and implementation of end-to-end agentic and automated debugging solutions for datacenter fleet health systems. It coordinates hardware, firmware, and software teams to diagnose faults across software, blade components, racks, and fleets, and creates reusable fixes and lessons. The engineer establishes goals, specifications, evidence standards, and operating limits for agents; leads complex problem resolution; and builds scalable debugging methodologies and automation for mission-critical services. The role is accountable for the quality and reliability of fleet-health agents and safe use of agent swarms in incident response and recovery.

Requirements

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field and 7+ years of technical engineering experience; or bachelor's degree in one of these fields or a related field and 8+ years of technical engineering 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

• 10+ years of technical leadership and a record of owning a measured reliability, quality, capacity, or recovery outcome at production scale using reliability engineering methods, and working across hardware, firmware, and software teams.
• Deep expertise in at least one server or datacenter infrastructure layer, such as CPU or SoC architecture, memory subsystem, storage, networking, virtualization, firmware, cloud-native operating systems, or fleet telemetry and data systems, with working fluency in how failures propagate.
• Ability to lead investigations of unfamiliar, difficult failures at scale by testing competing hypotheses, preserving evidence before repair, finding root cause across layers, and converting findings into a permanent fix, runbook, test, or automated check.
• Experience defining intent and limits for automated or AI-driven systems, including success criteria, evidence standards, outcome evaluation, human-approval boundaries, rollback, audit trails, and accountable ownership.
• Production operations experience with AI agents, including defining intent and success criteria, evaluating outputs, curating agent memory, governing agent actions, and addressing novel problems.
• Analytical rigor with large-scale telemetry and data tools, including defining metrics consistently, distinguishing measured results from targets, proxies, and estimates, and counting distinct machines rather than retries.
• Experience leading across organizational boundaries without line authority, aligning partners on workflow ownership, interfaces, and decision rights, and adopting evidence-based ideas from other teams.
• Ability to communicate decision-ready information to engineers and executives in writing, visuals, and live forums, including technical reports that state conclusions, evidence, confidence, and what could change the answer.
• Planning discipline in a fast-changing environment, including working in small, reversible steps, adapting as evidence changes, managing time and priorities, and setting an absorbable pace of change.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and implementation of end-to-end agentic and automated debugging solutions for at-scale datacenter fleet health systems.
• Lead collaboration projects across hardware, firmware, and software teams to drive end-to-end root cause analysis, define agent operating rules, and clarify handoffs and work ownership.
• Own execution of targeted agentic defect-reduction workflows for novel faults spanning software, blade components, racks, and fleets, turning fixes into reusable lessons.
• Lead resolution of complex problems using technical and business understanding.
• Set the goals, specifications, and evidence standards agents use to minimize errors identified late.
• Develop at-scale debugging methodologies for mission-critical services and build automation to improve debugging efficiency.
• Ensure fleet-health agent quality and reliability.
• Run agent swarms safely and set runtime limits for agentic support during incident response and recovery.

What This Job Offers

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