Principal Software Engineer - FDE

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

9d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineer will join Microsoft’s Frontier Company Engineering team, which uses a Forward Deployed Engineering model to embed with customer teams and solve complex problems through production-ready solutions. Working in small, multidisciplinary crews with data scientists, product managers, and domain experts, the engineer owns the full lifecycle from design through deployment. The role focuses on building reliable cloud and AI systems that turn ideas and data-driven insights into scalable solutions, applying AI and modern engineering practices throughout development while maintaining security, quality, and trust. The work directly influences customer outcomes and business strategy and involves collaboration with global organizations across industries.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6 or more years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the job duties.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8 or more years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12 or more years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, deploying, and operating AI or LLM-based solutions, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented approaches, model tuning, evaluation, data quality, performance monitoring, and use of cloud AI platforms.
• Familiarity with deploying and operating AI systems in production environments.
• Understanding of model evaluation, data quality, and performance monitoring.
• Experience using cloud AI platforms such as Azure ML, OpenAI, or similar.
• Enjoyment of travel and comfort with travel up to 25%.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship solutions that meet enterprise security standards, including threat modeling, secure coding, privacy, and compliance, from design through production.
• Partner with stakeholders to define problem statements, success metrics, and architectural approaches that deliver measurable outcomes.
• Own end-to-end system design for cloud and AI workloads, balancing reliability, performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Use CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and progressive delivery to iterate quickly and reduce operational risk.
• Work directly with customer engineering teams to deliver production-ready solutions, unblock delivery, and support adoption at scale.
• Create reusable solution accelerators, reference architectures, and code for use across customers and scenarios.
• Adapt as technologies and customer priorities evolve, bringing clarity, structure, and momentum to complex engagements.
• Provide technical direction, coach engineers, and collaborate with product, data, and security partners.
• Coordinate multiple workstreams and dependencies while promoting reliability and operational excellence for production services.
• Model inclusive, customer-obsessed leadership and represent the company professionally with external stakeholders.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the linked Microsoft careers page.

What This Job Offers

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