Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The mission of Commercial Engineering & AI (CEAI) is to accelerate the frontier transformation of Microsoft Commercial business with AI native engineering. As a Principal AI Architect, you will define and drive the end-to-end Cloud + AI + Agentic architecture for the next generation of tools/applications/agents for Customer Success and Consulting businesses within Microsoft. You will partner with engineering and product leadership to deliver secure, reliable, scalable, cost-effective AI systems and establish a roadmap for the Agentic era of Customer Success and Consulting. This is a high-impact architecture leadership role requiring broad technical depth, cross-team influence, and solid collaboration across engineering, product, data, security/compliance, and partner ecosystems—enabling others to execute at scale through shared standards, reusable patterns, and reference implementations. If you enjoy working in a collaborative and agile environment where you can apply your technical skills and creativity into a security space and thrive on addressing real-world problems, we are looking for you.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Master’s degree in computer science, Engineering or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- 10+ experience in software engineering or solution architecture, with demonstrable success building and operating complex systems.
- 10 + years of full-stack development across frontend, backend, and cloud infrastructure, with a proficient command of data engineering, AI/ML systems, and deployment architectures.
- Proficient coding skills in C#, Python, JavaScript, and React.
- Experience designing and shipping AI/ML GenAI solutions, including one or more of: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enterprise search, vector retrieval; LLM orchestration and agentic workflows; AI evaluation/monitoring, safety and quality measurement
- Experience architecting and delivering cloud-native, distributed systems at scale (multi-service systems, reliability, performance, and operability).
- Proficient engineering fundamentals and ability to work “hands-on when needed” (prototyping/reference implementations, architectural spike investigations, debugging complex issues).
- Experience with cross-team influence - driving alignment and execution across multiple disciplines and stakeholders.
- Experience communicating clearly with technical and non-technical audiences; comfort presenting senior leadership.
Responsibilities
- Own the reference architecture and technical roadmap for AI/Agentic platform capabilities (e.g., orchestration, skills, tools/plugins, memory, retrieval, evaluation, observability, governance).
- Translate Customer Success business objectives into platform investments and architectural decisions, balancing speed-to-value with security, compliance, cost, and long-term maintainability.
- Establish clear architectural guardrails and decision frameworks (e.g., “build vs. buy,” “Copilot Studio vs. Foundry,” “RAG vs. fine-tune,” “central vs. federated patterns”).
- Lead architecture/design reviews for major initiatives; drive alignment on system boundaries, contracts, dependency management, and resiliency.
- Define and standardize architecture patterns (multi-tenant SaaS, event-driven architectures, secure data access, model routing, agent safety controls).
- Create reusable templates, “golden paths,” and reference implementations to accelerate engineering delivery across teams and reduce fragmentation.
- Embed Responsible AI principles into agentic solution design (human-in-the-loop, safety mitigations, evaluation, transparency, and auditability).
- Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure services meet required controls and operational standards, and to drive alignment between policy intent and implementation.
- Define secure patterns for prompt/data handling, secrets management, identity, and access governance for AI systems.
- Drive architecture that improves reliability, observability, incident response readiness, and cost efficiency across AI-enabled services.
- Establish telemetry standards (quality, safety, latency, cost, success metrics) and ensure teams instrument consistently to enable operational excellence at scale.
- Design for production: rollout/rollback strategies, evaluation gates, and operational playbooks for AI/agent releases.
- Build coalitions across broader Microsoft engineering/product groups to deliver complex, large-scale initiatives; resolve long-standing misalignments; and hold stakeholders accountable for commitments.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior stakeholders, creating clarity, driving alignment, and enabling execution across multiple teams and disciplines.
- Mentor engineers; enhance architecture quality, engineering discipline, and Responsible AI rigor.
- Contribute to internal technical communities through documentation, brown bags, and reusable engineering guidance—amplifying impact through others.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
