Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a founding technical leader for the next generation of its commerce platform. This hands-on individual-contributor role will define engineering direction for a modern, extensible commerce ecosystem, translate customer and business needs into durable system designs, and make consequential cross-system technical decisions. The engineer will establish the foundation, standards, and reusable patterns for a future commerce engineering team. The role has broad organizational influence and works through technical leadership, code and design reviews, prototypes, operational evidence, and engineering guardrails rather than direct reporting authority. It partners with engineering, product, operations, security, privacy, systems integrators, and platform vendors to resolve ambiguity and improve engineering quality. Success includes delivering a dependable modern commerce platform and creating the technical foundation, practices, and culture for a future team.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Architecture leadership experience leading complex, cross-team system design, resolving ambiguity, and influencing technical decisions.
- Engineering experience designing reliable distributed systems and modernizing critical platforms while managing migration risk.
- Experience with commerce platforms, SaaS integrations, vendor evaluation, and governed AI capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end technical strategy, system design, and evolution roadmap for the commerce ecosystem.
- Define system boundaries, data ownership, interfaces, end-to-end flows, APIs, performance benchmarks, security, events, and integration patterns across commerce capabilities.
- Connect commerce capabilities to payments, tax, fraud prevention, fulfillment, returns, identity and consent, telemetry, and analytics.
- Establish engineering contracts with retained enterprise services so new and existing platforms can coexist without fragmented responsibilities or incompatible designs.
- Set technical direction and drive material cross-system design decisions within the commerce scope.
- Evaluate platform and build-versus-buy choices, configuration versus customization, interoperability, and vendor exit options.
- Make tradeoffs explicit; review partner and vendor designs; and validate high-risk assumptions using prototypes, code review, benchmarks, and operational evidence.
- Define measurable engineering requirements for resilience, scalability, performance, observability, security, accessibility, and operating cost.
- Design for transaction integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, failure recovery, and traceability across distributed APIs and event-driven workflows.
- Guide modernization through implementation, migration, coexistence, release, cutover, and rollback.
- Partner with delivery teams to verify implementation and production behavior against the intended system design, and remain accountable for technical integrity and platform evolution after launch.
- Establish engineering standards, reusable patterns, development practices, and decision mechanisms for a future commerce engineering team.
- Lead technical and code reviews, resolve conflicting approaches, and document important decisions, alternatives, rationale, owners, and implications.
- Influence and mentor engineers and technical leads across partner teams without relying on direct reporting authority.
- Create guardrails that enable teams to work independently while maintaining system coherence, production quality, and shared engineering standards.
- Design and build the platform for AI-assisted and agentic commerce through well-defined interfaces and controlled access.
- Enable agentic capabilities to evolve safely with appropriate permissions, consent, auditability, and controls for customer-impacting actions.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
