Principal Software Engineers (Commerce Platforms)
About The Position
Microsoft's Commerce Platforms organization builds and operates scalable, resilient, and AI-powered commerce and financial platforms supporting customers, partners, suppliers, and employees globally. The Principal Software Engineer provides technical leadership and drives the architecture, design, and evolution of modern cloud-native applications, distributed services, and large-scale data systems that turn complex data and workflows into trusted experiences and actionable insights. The role leads technical strategy and execution across frontend and backend systems, APIs, workflow orchestration, data engineering, analytics, and AI-powered capabilities. It defines scalable architectures, builds foundational platform capabilities, solves complex technical challenges, and influences engineering direction across teams and organizations. The engineer also shapes the use of AI-assisted engineering and emerging agentic workflows to improve customer experiences, accelerate development, modernize systems, and strengthen software quality and operational reliability. The position partners with engineering leaders, product managers, architects, and cross-functional teams to translate ambiguous business and technical challenges into long-term technical strategies. It leads by example, mentors engineers, drives alignment across organizational boundaries, and raises standards for architecture, security, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. Candidates living within 50 miles of Microsoft's Redmond campus are required to work in the office three days per week.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including Scala, Python, C#, or Java, 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
- Experience with cloud-native data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Lake, or comparable cloud technologies.
- Experience with modern web technologies, including intuitive interfaces and reusable backend capabilities.
- Experience with Azure DevOps, including source control, build and release pipelines, and CI/CD practices.
- Experience with software engineering fundamentals, including design, coding, testing, debugging, code reviews, and production support.
- Experience or domain knowledge in direct and/or indirect procurement, including enterprise purchasing, sourcing, supplier, catalog, or related workflows; or experience with SQL, data modeling, and large-scale data processing using Apache Spark, Delta Lake, or equivalent frameworks.
- Hands-on experience building AI-driven business solutions.
- Analytical, problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
- Experience building enterprise applications or platforms supporting complex workflows and API integrations across multiple systems.
- Experience building LLM-enabled applications, RAG solutions, AI agents, intelligent automation, or agentic workflows.
- Understanding of security, privacy, accessibility, reliability, and Responsible AI principles.
- Experience with automated testing, monitoring, telemetry, observability, and DevOps practices.
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design, development, and evolution of scalable, secure, and highly reliable cloud-native applications, distributed services, and data platforms.
- Define technical strategy and architectural direction for complex systems spanning applications, APIs, platform services, workflow orchestration, data, analytics, and AI capabilities.
- Drive end-to-end technical solutions using technologies such as C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, ReactJS, Azure services, REST APIs, and modern cloud and web technologies.
- Architect reusable data processing frameworks, data models, metrics, and data contracts for large-scale analytical, operational, and business requirements.
- Identify and lead opportunities to build intelligent experiences using Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AI agents, semantic search, and workflow orchestration.
- Translate complex and ambiguous business requirements into technical strategies, architectures, and execution plans that scale across teams and scenarios.
- Create and drive architecture proposals, technical roadmaps, implementation strategies, engineering standards, and operational readiness plans.
- Lead platform modernization efforts that improve scalability, resiliency, observability, security, compliance, accessibility, maintainability, performance, and developer productivity.
- Establish and champion engineering best practices in design, development, testing, CI/CD, code quality, secure development, operational readiness, and AI-assisted engineering.
- Improve live-site health through architecture, telemetry, automation, troubleshooting, incident learnings, performance optimization, and long-term engineering investments.
- Provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries and influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams and partner organizations.
- Mentor senior engineers, develop technical leaders, lead design and architecture reviews, and raise organizational engineering standards.
- Identify long-term technical risks and opportunities while balancing near-term business needs with platform sustainability, extensibility, and future growth.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
