Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
The AI Transformation team within Microsoft Frontier Company is reimagining how the company operates in the age of AI. The team works across the business to transform critical end-to-end workflows by bringing people, AI agents, and systems together. It combines engineering, applied AI, program leadership, and business transformation to move rapidly from opportunity to working solution, with a builder mindset and a focus on AI-native operating models and reusable solutions that improve operations and accelerate transformation at scale. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will apply software design and engineering expertise to build AI-powered solutions that transform company operations. You will work in small, multidisciplinary teams to move from prototype to production, using AI and agentic coding tools to build reliable applications, agents, integrations, and workflows that deliver measurable operational impact. The role includes architecture and design leadership, coding and implementation, experimentation, deployment, live-service reliability and support, telemetry and data analysis, engineering excellence, and collaboration across Microsoft teams. You will also embody Microsoft's culture and values.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and at least 6 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field and at least 10 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a master's degree in computer science or a related technical field and at least 8 years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
Responsibilities
- Partner with stakeholders to determine user requirements, incorporate feedback into designs and fixes, and establish feedback loops and metrics for customer value and usage.
- Lead architecture and design efforts, author design proposals and documents, make design decisions, select technologies, and ensure system architecture meets security and compliance expectations.
- Define and mentor others on testing plans and quality criteria; improve test coverage and suites, and integrate automation into testing.
- Identify product, service, platform, and team dependencies; document how systems and teams interact; coordinate across teams and resolve conflicts.
- Lead by example in producing extensible, maintainable code; optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code; establish coding patterns and quality metrics; and review code for quality, reliability, accuracy, and maintainability.
- Use debugging tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods to verify assumptions, diagnose issues, and identify root causes.
- Translate long-term project vision into milestones and roadmaps, guide estimates, and escalate issues that could cause major delays.
- Lead experimentation and prototyping, interpret results, determine next steps or ship decisions, and select metrics that measure customer value.
- Lead implementation and deployment in existing frameworks, account for deployment impact on users and services, optimize deployments for business objectives, and ensure safe releases.
- Maintain live services through rotational on-call work; mitigate complex incidents, write and review postmortems, act as a Designated Responsible Individual, monitor service health, alert stakeholders, and coordinate incident coverage and response.
- Develop playbooks, respond within SLA timeframes, escalate issues to owners, and lead efforts to reduce incident volume and address emerging issues.
- Integrate and review instrumentation for telemetry on performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety; use feedback from telemetry to inform designs and create notifications or dashboards.
- Collect, classify, and analyze system and product metrics, and use data analytics to refine products and make engineering decisions.
- Enhance, reuse, contribute to, and identify developer tools; share best practices and teach others about tools and strategies.
- Apply automation across production and deployment, validate code in non-production environments, and develop standardized, repeatable, scalable solutions that ensure quality.
- Ensure security, privacy, safety, accessibility, compliance evidence, and adherence to applicable regulations across solutions and teams.
- Stay current with technical developments, trends, tools, and practices; improve availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance; and share knowledge with engineers.
- Lead product development and scaling to meet customer requirements and performance expectations.
- Build and maintain partnerships across Microsoft's engineering ecosystem, align with partner expectations, and escalate complex blockers.
- Embody Microsoft's culture and values.
Benefits
- The posting notes that certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation, but does not specify particular benefits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
