Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
Generative AI is transforming how products are designed, built, measured, and operated at Microsoft 365 scale. Office Product Group aims to enable every engineer, product manager, designer, and data scientist to turn their best ideas into customer value through AI and agentic systems with significantly less friction and toil. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer and technical thought leader who will partner closely with product management and research to help define this transformation and drive adoption across our product development organization. Office Shared Services and Experiences (OSSE) builds the shared services and user experiences that power Office applications. As an embedded, product-focused central team, we operate at the center of Office product development and engineering. In partnership with teams across OPG and the engineering systems organization. In this role, you will define, build, and champion new ways of developing software in collaboration with AI agents. You will work across the software development lifecycle to accelerate the delivery of customer-facing features and fixes while reducing toil and frustration for engineers. We are looking for an engineer who can provide technical leadership, bring energy and focus to existing efforts, and identify high-impact areas for future investment. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice To Haves
- Prior experience building with Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar).
- Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Proven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.
- Software engineering fundamentals: system design, algorithms, testing, debugging, and code review.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.
- Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.
- Experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.
- Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
- Experience dogfooding, evaluating, and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translating those insights into team-wide best practices.
Responsibilities
- Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle, including design, architecture, implementation, testability, debugging, shipping, and servicing.
- Use AI-assisted development practices in your daily engineering work, continuously evaluate emerging approaches, and help teams and partners adopt effective, state-of-the-art practices.
- Demonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work — because no one has tried them before.
- Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers in, and beyond, your team.
- Write and review clean, well-thought-out code with an emphasis on quality, performance, simplicity, durability, scalability, and maintainability.
- Contribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
