Principal Software Development Engineer - XBOX Product Growth

Microsoft•Ca, CA

About The Position

The Principal Software Development Engineer will join Xbox Growth's Product team, which uses data, analytics, and product experimentation to help Xbox attract, engage, and retain players. The role focuses on Xbox's Core strategy pillar and on improving the console experience, player retention, and daily active users. The engineer works across product design, engineering, and data, with responsibility for shaping product hypotheses and visions as well as implementing them. The position spans the full stack and player journey, across multiple feature areas and organizational boundaries. The engineer will design and run experiments, use their results to make decisions, and take successful ideas through execution and scaling. The role also involves accelerating data-driven development through AI-enhanced workflows, mentoring engineers, participating in live-site support, and building secure, reliable, high-performing systems that meet Microsoft's privacy, compliance, and security requirements.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, XAML, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python; or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

3+ years shipping A/B tests end-to-end in production, including design, instrumentation, analysis, rollout, and improving experiment quality and guardrails.
Experience in growth engineering, retention, engagement, acquisition, or experimentation-focused teams.
6+ years building and shipping full-stack features across modern front ends such as TypeScript, React, or XAML and production services such as C# and .NET on cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure.
A demonstrated track record of proposing product ideas that were shipped and measured, and owning a growth, engagement, retention, or monetization metric across a sequence of experiments.
Experience collaborating across functions and teams, making production changes in other teams' codebases, navigating unfamiliar architectures, driving partner review processes, and engaging independently with design, product, and engineering.
Experience with large-scale telemetry, metric design, and querying analytics tools such as Kusto, Databricks, or comparable data platforms.
Demonstrated experience using AI extensively to accelerate engineering velocity, including researching, prototyping, implementing, debugging, and iterating on production features.
Experience shipping consumer products at scale in gaming, entertainment, commerce, or subscription businesses.

Responsibilities

Propose product hypotheses and vision, size opportunities, define success metrics, and execute experiments.
Design, ship, and iterate on growth experiments across Xbox surfaces, services, and feature areas to increase console retention and daily active users.
Design telemetry, metrics, and analytics systems that enable unambiguous evaluation of results, and analyze scorecards objectively.
Ship successful experiments and retire unsuccessful ones, including ideas of your own; use learnings to pivot and iterate quickly.
Form and defend a ranked set of product hypotheses, with clear metrics each is intended to move.
Build across the stack, including services, console clients, and instrumentation, and potentially web, mobile, or external surfaces, from prototype through general availability.
Make focused, reviewable changes in codebases owned by other teams and collaborate across organizational boundaries.
Participate in the team's live-site and on-call rotation.
Quickly orient yourself in large, unfamiliar codebases and deliver substantial technical changes.
Accelerate the team using agentic workflows and AI throughout the engineering lifecycle.
Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and engineering practices.
Use judgment to decide whether experiments should be scaled, iterated on, or abandoned.
Build secure, reliable, high-performing systems that meet Microsoft's privacy, compliance, and security requirements.
Balance speed and rigor, find low-cost tests for expensive questions, and prove impact with minimal upfront investment.
Use hypothesis-driven development to measurably improve key metrics.