Principal Software Engineer - Microsoft Substrate Data Plane team M365 Copilot App
About The Position
The Microsoft Substrate Data Plane team builds foundational, highly available, low-latency, massively distributed services that power Microsoft 365 experiences at planetary scale. Its platform processes and serves billions of signals, messages, documents, and interactions across Exchange, Teams, Copilot, and emerging AI-powered experiences. The Principal Software Engineer will lead the architecture, development, and operation of large-scale distributed systems supporting Copilot, AI agents, search, retrieval, indexing, and data-processing workloads across Microsoft 365. The role also involves shaping intelligent data services and agent-enabled platforms, partnering across product and engineering teams, and advancing platform strategy and engineering practices.
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#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Master’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.
- Bachelor’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 equivalent experience.
- Experience with modern AI-driven software development practices, tools, and feedback loops, using AI to accelerate engineering velocity, enhance developer productivity, and improve software quality.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate large-scale, highly available cloud services that power Microsoft 365 experiences for billions of requests and millions of users worldwide.
- Drive the architecture, development, and delivery of distributed systems focused on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Develop platform capabilities for AI-powered experiences, including agent orchestration, tool execution, data access, grounding, and workflow automation.
- Partner with product teams, service owners, and platform engineers to deliver intelligent, end-to-end experiences across Microsoft 365.
- Use telemetry, automation, and AI-assisted diagnostics to improve service health, accelerate incident mitigation, and enhance engineering productivity.
- Lead complex technical initiatives across teams, influence long-term platform strategy, and drive engineering best practices.
- Mentor engineers and foster a culture of innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
