Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft Security aims to make the world safer by building a security cloud that protects users, customers, developers, devices, and data across heterogeneous environments. The Microsoft Purview team builds cloud services for security, compliance, data governance, data loss prevention, and related experiences across Microsoft 365 and Windows. These global-scale services transport, store, secure, and manage sensitive customer data. The Principal Software Engineer will provide technical leadership within Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM), working across high-throughput, multi-tenant cloud services, large-scale distributed data processing systems, and AI-powered capabilities. The engineer will tackle complex and ambiguous technical challenges, establish technical direction across teams, and translate that direction into meaningful customer and business outcomes.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline and 6+ years of software engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
- Demonstrated experience designing and delivering complex, large-scale production systems.
- Demonstrated technical depth in distributed systems, cloud services, large-scale data processing, storage, or big data platforms.
- Demonstrated experience driving technical direction and delivering complex initiatives across multiple engineers or teams.
- Strong coding and debugging skills in languages such as C++, C#, Java, Python, or equivalent.
- Experience with Azure cloud technologies and large-scale distributed data processing platforms such as Apache Spark.
- Experience designing or shipping AI-powered capabilities, including LLM-based systems.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and turn ambiguous problems into executable engineering strategies.
- Strong customer orientation, engineering judgment, and bias toward action and results.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for complex, high-scale systems and drive architecture and design across distributed services, big data processing, and AI-powered capabilities, balancing scale, performance, reliability, security, and cost.
- Lead complex initiatives across team boundaries by identifying dependencies, clarifying ambiguous technical problems, aligning engineers and stakeholders, and driving execution to measurable outcomes.
- Raise the engineering bar across architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, security, reliability, performance, and maintainability; use AI to accelerate execution and improve engineering outcomes.
- Identify root causes and architectural bottlenecks, develop durable solutions, and improve service reliability and operational efficiency at scale.
- Mentor and coach engineers, lead design and code reviews, establish engineering patterns and standards, and help grow technical leadership across the organization.
- Use customer signals, operational data, and engineering insights to prioritize investments and ensure technical work translates into meaningful customer and business impact.
- Collaborate across organizational and discipline boundaries and influence technical and product decisions across partner teams.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
