Principal Software Engineer - AI Frameworks
About The Position
The Microsoft AI Frameworks team develops software, performance systems, and engineering tools that enable state-of-the-art AI models to run reliably and efficiently at cloud scale. Its work spans model architectures, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, libraries, observability, benchmarking, and hardware platforms, including NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and Microsoft silicon. The team partners with model developers, researchers, hardware teams, and production services to accelerate model and hardware onboarding, improve performance and reliability, enable modeling and optimization opportunities, and turn performance insights into durable platform capabilities. This hands-on technical leadership role establishes direction and leads teams through ambiguous, end-to-end systems challenges. The Principal Software Engineer serves as a technical lead for high-impact initiatives across AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling. The role sets technical direction, makes architectural decisions, and leads engineers across teams in delivering solutions that improve model velocity, platform efficiency, and production reliability. It also identifies systemic opportunities, aligns stakeholders around durable architectures and success measures, and contributes hands-on in critical implementation areas.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++ or Python, 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.
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++ or Python; or a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 15+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
- Experience serving as a technical lead for complex cross-team initiatives, including setting strategy, making architectural decisions, aligning stakeholders, and driving execution from concept through production.
- Extensive experience designing and shipping complex, high-performance, or distributed software systems.
- Deep foundation in software architecture, computer architecture, and accelerator-aware optimization.
- Advanced experience with AI/ML workloads and frameworks.
- Track record of creating reusable platforms, influencing senior technical and business stakeholders, developing other technical leaders, and scaling engineering practices across teams.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities.
- Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners accountable to clear decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
- Mentor engineers, develop emerging technical leads, establish high standards for quality and maintainability, and foster an inclusive engineering culture.
- Lead ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon; set technical priorities, resolve trade-offs, and drive decisions.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting the engineering approach, delegating and unblocking critical work, and contributing through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness.
- Develop common measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities.
- Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
- Identify, innovate, and productize modeling and optimization opportunities for frontier AI models.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; further information is available through Microsoft’s careers pay information page.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
