Principal Software Engineer - Performance

Microsoft • ,

6d • $165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

The Artificial Intelligence Performance team at Microsoft develops AI software that enables AI models to run efficiently. The team works with internal and external hardware partners at the intersection of AI algorithms, purpose-built AI hardware, systems, and software. It owns inference performance for OpenAI and other state-of-the-art large language models, collaborating directly with OpenAI on models hosted by Azure OpenAI and serving large workloads across Microsoft products.

This hands-on technical leadership role establishes direction and guides teams through ambiguous, end-to-end systems challenges. The successful candidate applies strong software engineering fundamentals, curiosity about AI workloads, and disciplined measurement to deliver production impact and align teams across organizational boundaries.

As a technical lead for high-impact initiatives spanning AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling, the Principal Software Engineer establishes technical direction, drives architectural decisions, and leads engineers across teams in designing and delivering solutions that improve model velocity, platform efficiency, and production reliability. The role identifies systemic opportunities, aligns stakeholders around durable architectures and success measures, and contributes hands-on to critical implementation work.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++ 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 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C++ or Python; or a bachelor’s degree in a related field and 15+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead for complex cross-team initiatives, including setting strategy, driving architectural decisions, aligning stakeholders, and leading execution from concept through production.
• Extensive experience designing and shipping complex, high-performance or distributed software systems.
• Deep foundation in software architecture, computer architecture, and accelerator-aware optimization.
• Advanced experience with AI/ML workloads and frameworks.
• Track record of creating reusable platforms, influencing senior technical and business stakeholders, developing other technical leaders, and scaling engineering practices across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities.
• Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners accountable to decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Mentor engineers, develop emerging technical leads, establish standards for quality and maintainability, and foster an inclusive engineering culture.
• Lead ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon; set priorities, resolve trade-offs, and drive decisions.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting engineering approaches, delegating and unblocking work, and contributing through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness.
• Spearhead shared measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities.
• Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.

What This Job Offers

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