Principal Software Engineer- AI Frameworks
About The Position
The Microsoft AI Frameworks team develops software, performance systems, and engineering tools that enable state-of-the-art AI models to run reliably and efficiently at cloud scale. The team works across model architectures, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, libraries, observability, benchmarking, and hardware platforms, including NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and Microsoft silicon. Principal Software Engineers partner with model developers, researchers, hardware teams, and production services to accelerate model onboarding, improve performance and reliability, reduce deployment time and hardware footprint, and turn performance insights into durable platform capabilities. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role focused on solving ambiguous, end-to-end systems problems. The engineer will set technical direction and lead high-impact initiatives across AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling. They will identify systemic opportunities, align teams around durable architectures and success measures, and remain hands-on in designing and delivering solutions that improve model velocity, platform efficiency, and production reliability. The role supports Microsoft’s mission to empower people and organizations and emphasizes responsible innovation, a growth mindset, and shared progress.
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++ 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
- Deep expertise in GPU or equivalent accelerator programming, compilation, and low-level execution, including intermediate representations, lowering, code generation, instruction-level behavior, memory hierarchy, and synchronization.
- Expertise in LLM training and inference parallelism strategies, including tensor, pipeline, data, and expert parallelism, and the ability to evaluate them for different models and hardware configurations.
- Expertise in distributed inference acceleration, including prefill/decode disaggregation, KV-cache transfer, collective communication, and compute/communication overlap.
- Strong understanding of LLM serving architectures such as vLLM, SGLang, or equivalent systems, with a track record of translating architectural improvements into measurable production gains.
- Demonstrated leadership of cross-team technical initiatives from strategy and design through implementation, deployment, and sustained production impact.
- Track record of creating reusable platforms, influencing stakeholders, and mentoring engineers.
- Ability to use AI-assisted development tools effectively and establish practices that improve engineering productivity without compromising correctness, performance, or maintainability.
Responsibilities
- Define technical vision, architecture, and multi-release strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities.
- Lead ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon.
- Establish common 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.
- Influence architecture and priorities across teams; align researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners around clear decisions and execution plans.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness.
- Mentor engineers, develop technical leaders, and advance standards for quality, maintainability, and inclusive collaboration.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
