Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

3d•$142,800 - $274,800

About The Position

The Agent 365 Foundation team owns the compute platform that runs Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot agent workloads, with a focus on container orchestration and isolation to secure tenant workloads. The Principal Software Engineer sets technical direction for the platform, makes major architectural decisions, and leads cross-team efforts spanning compute, networking, identity, and capacity. The platform supports mission-critical business applications and a growing set of agentic AI workloads; its design affects reliability, deployment velocity, and infrastructure cost. The role includes owning architecture for platform services and APIs that provision, scale, and secure containerized compute across Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, and Azure Kubernetes Service. It also leads platform investments from problem definition through rollout and live-site operation, ensuring reliability, security, and compliance. The engineer drives networking, identity, isolation, diagnostics, incident response, capacity planning, and cost efficiency, while mentoring engineers and raising technical quality across the organization. Microsoft describes its culture as grounded in a growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and at least 6 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, 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 at least 8 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor's degree in a related field and at least 12 years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
Deep expertise with container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, and Azure compute services such as AKS, Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, or Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Expertise with Microsoft stack technologies, particularly C#, .NET, and core Azure platform services.
Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and safe deployment practices, such as ARM or Bicep templates and Azure DevOps pipelines.
Depth in Azure networking concepts, including virtual networks, DNS, load balancing, and multi-tenant isolation.
Proven ownership of high-availability services at scale, including on-call leadership, incident command, and root cause analysis.
Experience with large-scale observability and diagnostics tooling, such as distributed tracing, metrics, and log analytics.
Experience with generative AI, agentic workloads, or LLM/ML systems and the infrastructure challenges they create.
Demonstrated cross-organizational technical leadership, including architecture and design reviews, mentoring engineers, and driving engineering standards beyond a single team.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and own the architecture for platform services and APIs that provision, scale, and secure containerized compute across Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Drive multi-team, multi-quarter platform investments from ambiguous problem statements through design, staged rollout, and live-site operation, maintaining Microsoft's reliability, security, and compliance standards.
Lead the platform's networking, identity, and isolation strategy, including virtual network integration, subnet delegation, managed identity, container isolation, least-access practices, and validation of security invariants—including safe execution of untrusted and AI-generated code.
Lead the use of debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods to verify assumptions and identify issues before they reach production.
Use minimal telemetry data to triangulate and resolve issues with minimal iterations.
Lead incident retrospectives, identify root causes and repair actions, establish mechanisms to prevent recurrence, and take a leading role in the on-call rotation for team services.
Drive capacity planning and infrastructure cost efficiency using telemetry and usage data.
Partner with Azure compute, networking, and identity teams to align platform roadmaps with agentic workload needs.
Mentor engineers, raise design and code quality through reviews, and share methods and best practices to grow the wider organization's technical depth.
Embody Microsoft's culture and values.