Principal Software Engineer, CoreAI

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

3d

About The Position

CoreAI is at the forefront of Microsoft’s mission to redefine how software is built and experienced. We are responsible for building the foundational platforms, services, programming models, and developer experiences that power the next generation of applications using Generative AI. Our work enables developers and enterprises to harness the full potential of AI to create intelligent, adaptive, and transformative software.
The AI Core Infrastructure team, part of AI Platform team in CoreAI Organization is responsible for large-scale, highly reliable and efficient GPU management infrastructure and the inference and training platforms that power all of Microsoft’s AI workloads, such as M365 CoPilot, Github CoPilot, Microsoft CoPilot, AI Foundry’s Inference and Fine-Tuning offering of OAI and OSS models, and many more.
As a Principal Engineer on the Observability team, you’ll shape the architecture and strategy on how customers monitor, troubleshoot, and scale their AI training workloads. You’ll work across ML infrastructure, distributed systems, and observability to power large-scale pre-training, post-training, and fine-tuning on some of the world’s largest AI supercomputers.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years of experience building or operating distributed systems, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C#, C++, Go, or Python.
• Strong understanding of Docker, Kubernetes, scalable architectures, and automation for production systems.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to extract customer pain points, synthesize ambiguous requirements, and design clear, scalable solutions.
• Expertise with distributed observability technologies (e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana) and 2+ years of experience designing or scaling telemetry pipelines for high-throughput production systems.
• Advanced, hands-on experience with production ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Set the roadmap and drive the execution of the Observability platform built for AI workloads at a supercomputer scale.
• Deliver deep insights that empower customers to troubleshoot and optimize their large-scale AI workloads
• Leverage production telemetry to influence next-generation infrastructure design, boosting efficiency, reliability, and performance
• Mentor and guide engineering teams, elevating technical excellence and championing a customer-focused approach to system design.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees