Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d • $142,800 - $274,800

About The Position

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team builds products across databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. The Databases organization delivers trusted, scalable, AI-ready operational databases across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

The One SQL Billing team is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to provide end-to-end technical leadership for billing across Azure SQL Database, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server. These business-critical systems process complex usage and licensing signals. The role focuses on improving billing correctness and reliability, addressing systemic causes of recurring production incidents, and simplifying and modernizing billing and usage-processing pipelines. The engineer will partner across product and platform teams to establish a cohesive long-term architecture and apply AI throughout the engineering lifecycle to improve quality, operational insight, and engineering effectiveness.

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.
• 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

• Experience designing, operating, or modernizing large-scale distributed cloud services, high-scale data-processing systems, or other business-critical platforms.
• Experience with billing, commerce, metering, licensing, usage processing, financial data systems, or other systems where correctness and traceability are critical.
• Experience simplifying or redesigning mature production systems involving multiple pipelines, data contracts, dependencies, and organizational boundaries.
• Proven ability to identify systemic failure patterns, lead complex production incident and root-cause investigations, and turn findings into lasting reliability and architectural improvements.
• Experience providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and aligning stakeholders around a common, multi-quarter technical strategy.
• Experience applying AI-assisted engineering techniques across software design, implementation, testing, debugging, validation, incident investigation, or operational analysis.
• Experience helping teams adopt reusable, responsible AI engineering practices.
• Experience with Azure, SQL systems, cloud commerce, or hybrid and multicloud services.

Responsibilities

• Provide end-to-end technical leadership for One SQL Billing across Azure SQL Database, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server.
• Turn ambiguous business and engineering needs into a cohesive technical strategy.
• Define and drive a multi-year architecture that simplifies, consolidates, and modernizes billing, metering, and usage-processing pipelines while supporting business growth.
• Improve billing correctness, reliability, observability, validation, and recovery by identifying systemic risks and eliminating recurring customer- and business-impacting issues.
• Lead technical investigations of complex production incidents, identify root causes, and turn incident learnings into lasting architectural, engineering, and operational improvements.
• Build alignment across product, commerce, and platform teams; influence technical decisions and drive multi-team initiatives toward common billing contracts, controls, and architecture.
• Model the use of AI across architecture and code understanding, development, testing, debugging, validation, incident analysis, and operational engineering.
• Create reusable practices that improve the effectiveness of the broader engineering organization.
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.

What This Job Offers

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