Principal Software Engineer, CoreAI

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

4d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft Foundry is building a platform that helps organizations create and operate AI-powered experiences at scale. This role focuses on making AI usage trustworthy by developing systems that make consumption accurate, explainable, and dependable for customers and partner teams.

The Principal Software Engineer will shape and implement distributed usage and billing systems spanning model onboarding, metering, processing, and reconciliation. As a hands-on technical leader, the engineer will contribute to cloud-scale architecture, event-driven processing, telemetry, recovery, schema evolution, regional validation, and cross-team technical leadership. Flexible work options, including remote and in-office arrangements, will be discussed based on the role, work location, and applicable Microsoft policies.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and at least 8 years of software-development experience using one or more programming languages, or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating cloud services, distributed backend services, or data-processing systems in production.
• Strong coding and system-design skills, including API and data-model design, automated testing, debugging, and maintainable production code.
• Demonstrated ability to improve service reliability through testing, telemetry, incident diagnosis, and lasting engineering fixes.
• Hands-on technical ownership from design through production, with experience leading across teams, communicating trade-offs, and delivering through collaboration.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with billing, usage metering, or reconciliation.
• Familiarity with AI model usage, token-based measurement, event-driven architectures, and cloud-scale telemetry or analytics platforms.
• Experience with resilient processing patterns, replay and recovery, schema evolution, and automated end-to-end validation across deployment regions.
• A record of mentoring engineers and improving engineering quality through practical technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, reliable, and secure cloud services, setting technical direction for resilient architecture and maintainable software.
• Translate customer and business needs into technical architecture and delivered solutions, balancing long-term service goals with practical execution.
• Collaborate across engineering, product, and partner teams to clarify requirements, align interfaces and dependencies, and resolve technical trade-offs.
• Own the end-to-end service lifecycle, from design and implementation through testing, deployment, and operations, continuously improving quality and service health.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through production code, design and code reviews, and mentoring that strengthens engineering judgment and delivery across teams.

What This Job Offers

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