Principal Software Engineer- Substrate SPARTANs
About The Position
The Principal Software Engineer will join the Special Projects and Resources Team (SPARTANs) in M365 Core - Substrate. SPARTANs tackle strategic projects and difficult problems across M365 Core to remove agility and modernization barriers for Substrate engineers. Substrate is the data and intelligence platform underpinning Microsoft 365, enabling partner teams to build, run, and modernize compliant, reliable services globally. The team stands up outcome-oriented missions to unblock critical programs in modernization, resilience, cost optimization, compliance, and developer productivity, and is dedicated to serving others and making a positive impact across teams and the broader community. The role calls for technical leadership on ambiguous, high-visibility projects across distributed services and organizational boundaries. The engineer frames problems, develops clear success criteria, owns technical outcomes from investigation through deployment and measurement, and leaves reusable engineering patterns, documentation, and playbooks. They balance reliability, cost, compliance, and time-to-impact, and improve service performance, resilience, observability, and incident readiness. The engineer also influences partner teams, communicates technical positions to executives and engineers, and mentors senior and principal engineers while helping build an inclusive engineering community.
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.
- Technical leadership experience on complex distributed systems, delivered through influence rather than authority.
- Depth in design and coding in C#, Java, C++, Rust, or a comparable language, with a tested approach for gaining expertise and confidence in unfamiliar codebases.
- Strong distributed-systems fundamentals, including high-scale, low-latency, always-on services that are inexpensive to operate.
- Demonstrated performance-engineering experience, including diagnosing and fixing production performance and cost problems.
- Excellent cross-group influence and written and verbal communication skills, including communicating evidence-based impact to executive audiences.
- Inclusive, collaborative working style; listens well, communicates openly, and values team belonging.
- 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.
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 modernization at scale, such as framework, language, or platform migrations; developer productivity; or compliance-constrained engineering.
- Solid coding, design, and problem-solving skills, with proven ownership of architecture for a significant service or platform component.
- Experience building reliable and resilient services and ramping quickly on new technologies.
Responsibilities
- Navigate ambiguous problems by quickly understanding unfamiliar codebases, forming hypotheses, and turning open-ended requests into scoped projects with clear success criteria.
- Own technical outcomes for high-visibility projects from problem framing through deployment and measurement of impact.
- Produce clean, testable, observable code and leave reusable patterns, documentation, and playbooks.
- Coordinate and influence partner teams, negotiate dependencies and sequencing, and deliver changes across repositories and service boundaries outside direct ownership.
- Communicate and represent technical positions credibly to executives and engineering teams.
- Make and revisit engineering decisions by weighing reliability, cost, compliance, and time-to-impact under incomplete information.
- Diagnose and fix latency, scale, and cost problems in always-on distributed services.
- Improve service resilience, observability, and incident readiness; serve as a Designated Responsible Individual across products when needed.
- Mentor senior and principal engineers and review designs across the organization.
- Help others develop effective techniques for ramping up quickly and reasoning through engineering problems; model a growth mindset.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
