Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

3d

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to shape the next generation of its engineering platform. The role focuses on simplifying software development and operations by turning complex infrastructure into intuitive capabilities, making reliability and security default experiences, and using AI to reduce engineering toil. The engineer will influence platform architecture and practices across teams while addressing scalability, performance, observability, and developer experience. As a hands-on technical leader, this person will set architectural direction, write production code, lead cross-team initiatives, and take ideas from exploration through production adoption.

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.
• Alternatively, a master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or a bachelor’s degree in the field and 12+ 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.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or shared platform services in production.
• Experience building platforms or developer tools adopted across multiple teams, with demonstrated improvements in engineering productivity, service reliability, or operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience integrating large language models or agents into engineering workflows, including tool integration, evaluation, permission boundaries, and human oversight.
• Experience designing interfaces and workflows for both human developers and AI agents, with clear contracts, discoverable capabilities, and auditable execution.
• Depth in one or more platform domains, such as service frameworks, data infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, experimentation, configuration management, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience using telemetry, profiling, and production investigations to identify systemic bottlenecks and deliver measurable performance or cost improvements.
• Experience modernizing established systems through incremental architecture changes and migrations while preserving customer and partner confidence.
• Track record of balancing exploration with pragmatic delivery, turning prototypes into supported, widely adopted platform capabilities.
• Solid systems engineering fundamentals, including API design, concurrency, data management, failure handling, and performance analysis.
• Ability to identify valuable applications of AI, write production code, lead difficult implementation work, and critically evaluate correctness, security, reliability, and cost.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on complex, multi-team initiatives, including architectural decisions and delivery through production adoption.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements and developer needs into practical, maintainable technical solutions.
• Communication and collaboration skills, including explaining technical tradeoffs, influencing decisions, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive a platform roadmap that connects long-term architectural investments with engineering-team and business needs.
• Develop AI-assisted and agent-based capabilities for engineering workflows such as troubleshooting, testing, migrations, and operational analysis; establish evaluations and safeguards for trustworthy results.
• Work with partner teams to understand friction, validate solutions, and develop self-service platform capabilities that engineers adopt.
• Build automated validation, progressive rollout, observability, and recovery mechanisms to support safe, rapid delivery.
• Lead initiatives end to end, from problem definition and architecture through implementation, adoption, and ongoing operation; measure developer experience, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Align stakeholders on priorities and technical tradeoffs, resolve ambiguous problems, and create shared approaches that let teams evolve independently.
• Write code, mentor engineers, guide design reviews, and foster curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

What This Job Offers

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