Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

13d•$142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft 365 Copilot’s Agent platform provides the runtime, integrations across Microsoft 365 apps, and platform capabilities used to build features for Flagship, first-party, and third-party agents. The team is building a modular, event-driven platform intended to improve agility, reliability, and composability across Copilot experiences. The Principal Software Engineer will design, develop, and harden core platform capabilities, including real-time multimodal orchestration, durable long-running tasks, and self-service partner tooling. The role involves designing and delivering platform services; coding, debugging, testing, and troubleshooting production systems; contributing to safe deployment and flighting practices; building telemetry and evaluations; and collaborating with partner teams to deliver features across products. The engineer will apply deep distributed-systems knowledge and software engineering principles to build high-quality, observable, reliable services that meet partner and user needs and comply with Microsoft 365 Core engineering standards. The role also includes technical leadership, mentoring, design and planning work across products, and participation in on-call rotations. The platform supports Copilot experiences across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other products.

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.
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 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 a related field and 12 or more years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
2 or more years of experience building and designing complex web applications.
2 or more years of experience with web performance, including web profiling tools and industry best practices.
2 or more years of experience defining engineering culture for a broader organization, including practices for automation, performance, and reliability.
2 or more years of experience leading teams of 5 or more engineers on complex engineering projects in web development.

Responsibilities

Guide engineers within and across teams in producing extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that follows design specifications.
Partner with stakeholders to determine user requirements for complex scenarios.
Provide technical leadership in identifying dependencies and developing design documents for products, applications, services, or platforms.
Lead by example and mentor engineers to produce high-quality code used across the company, promoting engineering excellence and long-term maintainability.
Use cross-product subject-matter expertise to collaborate with stakeholders and lead project plans, release plans, and work items across multiple products.
Serve as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentor engineers across products and solutions, and participate in on-call rotations to monitor system, product, or service health, including degradation, downtime, and interruptions.
Seek and apply knowledge of emerging trends, technologies, and patterns to improve availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance; drive consistent monitoring and operations at scale; and share learnings with other engineers.
Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.