Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

The Agent 365 Foundation team builds the shared infrastructure behind Microsoft's agent platform. Agents across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and beyond are deployed, secured, scaled and governed on this platform. The team tackles distributed-systems challenges at significant scale, with decisions affecting thousands of services and millions of customers. The Agent 365 Shared Infrastructure & Foundation team builds hosting, compute and platform services for agent workloads across Microsoft. It is developing a fault-tolerant, cell-based architecture that enables teams to ship quickly and securely, with compliance built in by default. The work involves resource governance, noisy-neighbor isolation, multi-region expansion and sovereign-cloud boundaries. The team aims to provide 99.99% reliability for thousands of services, with best practices built in from day one. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set technical direction and own the architecture for core parts of the Agent 365 platform. You will lead complex investigations and cross-team efforts, design resilient systems using Azure and related compute technologies, establish engineering standards, and mentor senior engineers.

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, 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 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 such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript or Python; or a bachelor's degree in a related field and 15+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed services or cloud infrastructure in production.
Deep experience with Azure and container platforms such as AKS, Kubernetes or Service Fabric, and reliability engineering for services with 99.99%+ availability.
A track record of setting technical direction across teams and solving ambiguous, cross-service problems through structured, data-driven thinking.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs clearly to engineers and leaders.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and own the architecture for core parts of the Agent 365 platform, making trade-offs among scale, reliability, cost and speed with a long-term perspective.
Lead complex cross-service investigations in high-throughput, multi-tenant systems, from initial signal through lasting resolution, using data and first-principles thinking.
Design and deliver cell-based, fault-tolerant systems with Azure, including AKS and related compute, maintaining reliability, security and compliance as the platform grows.
Set standards for design, code quality, testing and operational excellence, and lead by example through design reviews, incident retrospectives and hands-on work.
Align partner teams across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure on shared platform direction, and translate ambiguity into executable plans.
Mentor senior engineers and foster a culture of curiosity, healthy debate and ownership.