Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
The Agent 365 Foundation team owns the compute platform that runs Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot agent workloads, specializing in container orchestration and isolation for tenant security. The Principal Software Engineer sets the platform’s technical direction, owns major architectural decisions, and leads efforts spanning compute, networking, identity, and capacity. The role combines infrastructure engineering with direct product impact: the platform supports mission-critical business applications and a growing set of agentic AI workloads, with design choices affecting reliability, deployment velocity, and infrastructure cost. The position calls for leading platform services and APIs that provision, scale, and secure containerized compute across Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, and Azure Kubernetes Service. It also involves driving multi-team investments, maintaining reliability and security, guiding incident response and on-call work, planning capacity and cost efficiency, and mentoring engineers. Microsoft describes its culture as grounded in growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.
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.
- 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 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor's degree and 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 problems 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, meeting Microsoft's reliability, security, and compliance standards.
- Lead the platform's networking, identity, and isolation strategy, including virtual network integration, subnet delegation, managed identity, and container isolation.
- Drive secure design principles, least-access practices, and formal 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 resolve issues before they reach production.
- Lead incident retrospectives, identify root causes and repair actions, and establish mechanisms to prevent recurrence; take a leading role in the services' on-call rotation.
- 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, improve design and code quality through reviews, and share methods and best practices across the organization.
- Embody Microsoft's culture and values.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
