Principal Software Engineer - Systems and Infrastructure

Microsoft • Mountain View, CA

9d • $165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer - Systems and Infrastructure will provide technical leadership for complex and ambiguous products and solutions across Microsoft’s AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems organization. The role owns system architecture, aligns technical decisions with customer and business outcomes, guides multiple initiatives, and shapes reusable platforms supporting Microsoft products and AI services at scale.

The engineer independently identifies and prioritizes technical challenges, translates loosely defined requirements into pragmatic architectures and working systems, establishes engineering standards, mentors technical leaders, and influences cross-functional teams and open-source communities. The role advances secure, reliable, maintainable infrastructure and helps shape organization-wide infrastructure strategy and engineering standards.

The AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale. Its work spans service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management. The role collaborates with AI researchers, product engineers, hardware teams, and technical leaders to evolve production systems and build infrastructure for AI workloads, including large-scale model inference.

Candidates must meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing a Microsoft Background Check and Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

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 the Microsoft Background Check and 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 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor’s degree in the field and 15+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience providing architecture and technical leadership for multiple large-scale distributed systems, databases, analytics systems, or platform product areas.
• Experience aligning technical decisions with business outcomes and influencing cross-functional teams and senior technical leadership.
• Experience developing systems with languages such as Java, C++, or Rust and applying concepts such as query execution, indexing, concurrency, distributed algorithms, or data structures.
• Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in open-source project management and governance.
• Experience building interactive services, analytics interfaces, data infrastructure, compute infrastructure, or other large-scale platform systems.
• Demonstrated ability to independently navigate ambiguous technical challenges, define problems, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and deliver solutions in complex, evolving environments.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure concepts such as model inference, GPU computing, model serving, or distributed training.

Responsibilities

• Own and oversee architecture for deeply complex and ambiguous products and solutions; evaluate design options and trade-offs and align decisions with customer, business, and long-term platform outcomes.
• Drive innovation and delivery across multiple large-scale initiatives, guiding teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization.
• Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code for organizational reuse while meeting performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, security, compliance, and cost requirements.
• Establish and champion company-wide coding, testing, architecture, and operational standards; provide technical leadership in reviews and mentor engineers and technical leaders.
• Serve as a technical authority for cross-product debugging, verification, telemetry, incident learning, repair actions, and automation targeting zero-touch deployment and recurrence prevention.
• Build alignment across teams, customers, and technical leadership; negotiate dependencies and trade-offs, hold stakeholders accountable, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.
• Influence open-source projects and industry practices, evaluate emerging technologies, and advance layered security, privacy, safety, and strategic compliance.
• Collaborate across infrastructure and AI teams to improve the performance, efficiency, and reliability of large-scale AI workloads, including model inference.
• Drive complex, ambiguous infrastructure initiatives from problem discovery through architecture, implementation, and production, making sound technical decisions amid incomplete information.

What This Job Offers

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