Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

3d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to shape the next generation of its platform by applying deep distributed-systems expertise and an AI-forward perspective. The role focuses on simplifying software development and operations by turning complex infrastructure into intuitive capabilities, making reliability and security part of the default experience, and using AI to reduce engineering overhead.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will influence architectural direction, write production code, lead cross-team initiatives, and carry ideas from exploration through production adoption. You will address scalability, performance, observability, and developer experience, while exploring intelligent automation for building and operating platforms. Your work will help engineering teams deliver products more quickly and confidently and establish engineering practices for an AI-enabled platform.

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.
• Alternatively, a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in the listed or similar languages, or equivalent experience; or a Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of such experience, 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 designing, building, and operating distributed systems or shared platform services in production.
• Experience building platforms or developer tools adopted across multiple teams, with demonstrated improvements in engineering productivity, service reliability, or operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience integrating large language models or agents into engineering workflows, including tool integration, evaluation, permission boundaries, and human oversight.
• Experience designing interfaces and workflows for human developers and AI agents, with clear contracts, discoverable capabilities, and auditable execution.
• Depth in one or more platform domains, such as service frameworks, data infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, experimentation, configuration management, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience using telemetry, profiling, and production investigations to identify systemic bottlenecks and deliver measurable performance or cost improvements.
• Experience modernizing established systems through incremental architecture changes and migrations while preserving customer and partner confidence.
• Track record of balancing forward-looking exploration with pragmatic delivery and turning successful prototypes into supported, widely adopted platform capabilities.
• Solid systems engineering fundamentals, including API design, concurrency, data management, failure handling, and performance analysis.
• Ability to identify valuable applications of AI, write production code, lead difficult implementation work, and critically evaluate correctness, security, reliability, and cost.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on complex initiatives spanning multiple teams, including architectural decisions and delivery through production adoption.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements and developer needs into practical, maintainable technical solutions.
• Solid communication and collaboration skills, including explaining technical tradeoffs, influencing decisions, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive a platform roadmap connecting long-term architectural investments with engineering-team and business needs.
• Develop AI-assisted and agent-based engineering capabilities for workflows such as troubleshooting, testing, migrations, and operational analysis; establish evaluations and safeguards to support trustworthy results.
• Work directly with partner teams to understand friction, validate solutions, and create self-service platform capabilities that engineers adopt.
• Build automated validation, progressive rollout, observability, and recovery mechanisms that support safer, faster delivery.
• Lead initiatives end to end, from problem definition and architecture through implementation, adoption, and ongoing operation; measure outcomes in developer experience, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Align stakeholders on priorities and technical tradeoffs, resolve ambiguous problems, and establish shared approaches that enable teams to evolve independently.
• Stay close to code, mentor engineers, guide design reviews, and foster curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

What This Job Offers

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