Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•,

4d•$165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

Microsoft’s Azure Core organization builds foundational infrastructure for Azure, supporting compute, networking, and storage services. The Principal Software Engineer will help evolve Microsoft’s high-performance, security-critical virtualization platform, with a focus on virtualizing devices such as GPUs and NVMe controllers. The role shapes foundational technology used by Hyper-V, Azure, Windows, Linux, and containers. This is a technical systems engineering position focused on software at the hardware/software boundary. The engineer will work with architects, firmware engineers, hardware designers, and platform teams to deliver scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure for Azure at hyperscale. The role also provides technical leadership across complex initiatives and contributes to architectural direction within Azure Boost and host platform infrastructure.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, 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 developing low-level systems software, including operating systems, kernel components, hypervisors, virtualization platforms, device drivers, or platform infrastructure services.
Experience owning and delivering significant portions of a DPU, SmartNIC, host platform, or accelerator software stack.
Experience with hardware acceleration technologies and interfaces such as PCIe, DMA, SR-IOV, RDMA, NVMe, IOMMU, hardware offloads, and device virtualization.
Experience designing software at the hardware/software boundary and collaborating with firmware, silicon, platform architecture, and hardware engineering teams.
Experience developing performance-critical systems software in C/C++ and/or Rust.
Experience building, debugging, and operating large-scale cloud infrastructure systems in production environments.
Systems performance analysis and troubleshooting skills, including root cause analysis of complex platform, networking, storage, or virtualization issues.
Understanding of high-performance networking and storage dataplanes and I/O subsystems, including methods for optimizing latency, throughput, scalability, and resource efficiency.
Familiarity with Linux and Windows internals, virtualization technologies, container platforms, and cloud infrastructure architectures.
Demonstrated ability to drive technical design and execution across multiple engineering teams through architecture reviews, design leadership, and hands-on technical contributions.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 15+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Define architecture and deliver foundational capabilities as a key technical leader within Microsoft’s virtualization platform.
Design, implement, and deliver features across the virtualization platform, focusing on device virtualization.
Develop low-level systems software spanning operating systems, virtualization, host infrastructure, device management, and DPU-host interaction layers.
Design and implement high-performance networking and storage dataplane capabilities, optimizing throughput, latency, scalability, reliability, and resource efficiency at hyperscale.
Partner with hardware architects, firmware engineers, and platform software teams to deliver integrated hardware/software solutions for next-generation Azure infrastructure platforms.
Lead technical execution for complex cross-functional initiatives, driving design alignment, implementation quality, and delivery across engineering teams.
Identify and resolve system-level challenges involving performance, reliability, diagnosability, scalability, and security.
Drive technical design reviews and contribute to architectural direction within Azure Boost and host platform infrastructure.
Develop software that interfaces directly with DPUs, accelerators, PCIe devices, virtualization technologies, and platform management subsystems.
Establish engineering best practices for software quality, testing, validation, observability, and operational readiness in large-scale production environments.
Collaborate across Azure Core, networking, storage, silicon, and platform engineering teams to influence technical direction and improve platform capabilities.
Mentor and develop engineers through technical leadership, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on guidance.
Stay current on advancements in systems software, virtualization, networking, storage, and hardware acceleration, and incorporate relevant innovations into Azure platform designs.