Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

4d • $165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

The Commerce Financial Platform organization builds intelligent, scalable services & experiences that power Microsoft’s commerce needs end‑to‑end. We’re accelerating a new era of AI‑driven business applications—grounded in data, built for collaboration, and designed to simplify complex workflows across CRM/ERP scenarios. If you’re excited to shape how people interact with AI at enterprise scale, continuously improve processes and deliver products.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role.
• This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• 8+ years building and shipping production software/services including 3+ years with modern ML (e.g., transformer‑based LLMs) and applied AI/ML systems.
• Strong coding skills in one or more: Python, C#, or C++—with design/architecture experience for cloud services (Azure preferred).
• Hands‑on experience taking LLM/ML features from prototype to production (evaluation, safety, telemetry, and iterative improvement).
• Ability to influence across teams and drive ambiguous, multi‑partner initiatives to outcomes.
• Experience with agentic systems, model/tool orchestration, and/or retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG).
• Expertise with Azure AI, vector stores, prompt/response evaluation, and performance optimization for LLM workloads.
• Track record of shipping applied research to production and partnering with research teams on custom/fine‑tuned models.
• Familiarity with Responsible AI practices and inclusive design/accessibility standards.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship AI systems end‑to‑end—from exploration to production—spanning LLM‑based services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and robust evaluation/observability.
• Build agentic and tool‑using workflows that reason across data and services, optimizing for safety, latency, and cost at cloud scale (Azure preferred).
• Collaborate across research and product teams to adapt/fine‑tune models (LLMs/SLMs, multimodal) for real customer scenarios.
• Lead technical direction across features and services; mentor engineers; champion high engineering standards, reliability, and accessible, inclusive experiences.
• Uphold Responsible AI, secure and compliance practices in design, data handling, and experimentation.
• Participate in on‑call/operational excellence as part of a healthy, sustainable engineering culture; lead by example.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

What This Job Offers

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