Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI
About The Position
Microsoft's Core AI organization builds the end-to-end Azure AI stack and PaaS, including global infrastructure for large AI workloads. Within Core AI, the Azure AI Knowledge team powers search experiences and knowledge services for applications and LLMs, bringing together content understanding and search relevance. The team develops Azure AI Search and retrieval systems that combine large language models with external data for Copilot-style applications. The Principal Software Engineer will lead development of large-scale cloud services and AI-powered products at the intersection of AI, information retrieval, and cloud services. The role focuses on secure, permission-aware retrieval and knowledge systems, globally distributed infrastructure, and foundational services for Microsoft Foundry, AI agents, enterprise knowledge experiences, and future retrieval platforms. The engineer will provide technical leadership, collaborate across teams, and uphold operational excellence, security, privacy, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including 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.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems in a cloud environment.
- Strong software engineering skills in C#, Java, C++, Rust, or a comparable language.
- Experience developing highly available services focused on reliability, performance, and maintainability.
- Knowledge of cloud-native architectures, storage systems, networking, and service operations.
- Excellent problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills.
- Experience with search technologies, information retrieval, ranking systems, vector databases, or recommendation systems.
- Experience with AI/ML systems, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent frameworks, or knowledge management platforms.
- Familiarity with Azure services, distributed data systems, and large-scale processing pipelines.
- Experience building developer platforms, APIs, or enterprise SaaS products.
- Passion for operational excellence, observability, automation, and customer-focused engineering.
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and delivery of large-scale cloud services and AI-powered products.
- Author design proposals, drive engineering execution, and ensure quality through testing, automation, and security compliance.
- Partner with stakeholders, customers, and cross-functional teams to understand requirements, incorporate feedback, and define success metrics.
- Design and build secure, permission-aware retrieval and knowledge systems integrated with enterprise identity, authentication, and authorization platforms.
- Drive scalability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence across globally distributed cloud infrastructure.
- Establish telemetry, monitoring, and diagnostics to identify and resolve issues proactively.
- Mentor engineers through technical leadership, code reviews, and engineering best practices.
- Lead project planning, experimentation, and deployment strategies; evaluate technical tradeoffs and ensure safe, reliable releases.
- Own live-site operations, incident response, and root cause analysis; develop operational playbooks and processes.
- Collaborate with product managers, applied scientists, architects, and partner teams to deliver AI experiences and platform capabilities.
- Analyze production telemetry, customer feedback, and usage patterns to improve performance, quality, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Contribute to foundational services powering Microsoft Foundry, AI agents, enterprise knowledge experiences, and next-generation retrieval platforms.
- Promote engineering excellence through automation, developer productivity investments, and continuous process improvement while maintaining compliance with security, privacy, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.
- Drive cross-team collaboration to resolve dependencies, align technical strategy, and deliver integrated solutions.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; the posting refers applicants to Microsoft's benefits and pay information page.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
