Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

11h • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

The AI Transformation team within Microsoft Frontier Company reimagines how the company operates in the age of AI. It works across the business to transform end-to-end workflows by bringing people, AI agents, and systems together, with the goal of developing AI-native operating models and reusable solutions that improve operations and accelerate transformation at scale. The multidisciplinary team combines engineering, applied AI, program leadership, and business transformation, moving from opportunities to working solutions with a hands-on, collaborative, action-oriented approach.

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 rapidly from prototype to production, using AI and agentic coding tools to create reliable applications, agents, integrations, and workflows that deliver measurable operational impact. The role also involves embodying Microsoft's culture and values.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, 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 10+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or equivalent experience.
• Master's degree in computer science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders to determine user requirements, incorporate feedback into designs and fixes, and establish feedback loops and metrics that measure customer value and usage.
• Lead architecture and design efforts, create proposals and design documents, test hypotheses, make design decisions, and ensure system architecture meets security and compliance expectations.
• Create and mentor others in plans for testing and quality assurance; define test success, improve test coverage and suites, and incorporate automation into testing.
• Identify dependencies and collaborating teams, document how systems and technologies interact, coordinate across teams, and address cross-team conflicts and impacts.
• Lead by example in producing extensible, maintainable code; optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code; establish coding practices and metrics; and mentor other engineers.
• Use debugging tools, logs, telemetry, and code to verify assumptions, prevent and resolve issues, and identify root causes through retrospective debugging.
• Review code for quality, reliability, accuracy, scale, diagnosability, and maintainability, and provide feedback to promote coding standards and best practices.
• Guide project plans, release plans, work items, roadmaps, milestones, estimates, and escalation of issues that could cause major delays.
• Lead experimentation and prototyping, interpret results, identify customer-value metrics, and determine next steps or ship decisions.
• Create implementation frameworks when needed and lead implementation and deployment, accounting for impacts on users and services and ensuring safe deployments.
• Maintain live-service operations on a rotational on-call basis; mitigate complex service issues, write and review postmortems, and share findings.
• Serve as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), monitor services for degradation or interruption, alert stakeholders, coordinate incident coverage, respond within SLA timeframes, develop playbooks, and lead efforts to reduce incidents.
• Integrate and review instrumentation for telemetry, create telemetry outputs such as notifications or dashboards, and use feedback from telemetry to inform designs while meeting scalability, financial, and capture/storage guidelines.
• Collect, classify, and analyze complex operational and product metrics and use data-informed decisions to refine products.
• Enhance, reuse, and contribute to developer tools; identify or create tools for product development and maintenance; use open source where possible; and teach others tools and practices.
• Apply automation across production and deployment, validate code in simulated or non-production environments, and develop standardized, repeatable, scalable quality solutions.
• Ensure appropriate security, privacy, safety, accessibility, and compliance processes, maintain evidence of compliance, and understand compliance implications of onboarding technologies.
• Stay current with technical developments and regulations, adopt useful trends and practices, improve product availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, performance, and scale, and share knowledge with engineers.
• Build and maintain relationships with partners across Microsoft's engineering ecosystem, align with partner expectations, support desirable user experiences, and escalate complex blockers.
• Embody Microsoft's culture and values.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; details are available through the provided Microsoft benefits and pay information link.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal