Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

3d•$119,800 - $261,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is establishing a Forward Deployed Engineering team to embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations. This team will work directly within customer environments to build alongside their engineers and ensure their developers and agents can run production workloads on Windows. The primary measure of success for this team is adoption, meaning when a customer's engineering organization successfully moves a real workload onto Windows and maintains it there. This is a founding team, offering engineers the opportunity to define the engagement model. As a Senior Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you will be responsible for end-to-end engagements, from discovery to production, and will be the team's expert on agentic workloads on Windows, including coding agents, agent runtimes, local and hybrid inference, and AI-native development loops. You will be expected to identify and resolve issues that cause agents to perform worse on Windows compared to other platforms, working within both customer and Microsoft codebases.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ 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.
Must pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

Production experience building or deploying systems powered by large language models (LLMs), including agent development, prompt and context engineering, evaluation frameworks, tool and MCP integration, and deployment at scale.
Solid programming ability in Python and at least one of TypeScript, C#, Rust, Go, C or C++, with a record of shipping production software.
Experience in a customer-facing engineering role (forward deployed engineering, field engineering, technical consulting, escalation engineering, solutions architecture, or technical founder) working directly with another organization's engineers in their environment.
Technical knowledge of the Windows developer platform, including several of: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), containers and virtualization, developer environment and configuration, toolchain and build performance, local inference and hardware acceleration, and the security and policy controls that shape developer machines in an enterprise.
Experience diagnosing performance and reliability problems using structured methods (telemetry, traces, profiling, Windows Performance Analyzer or comparable tooling) in systems you did not write.
Demonstrated ability to turn a solution built for one customer into something repeatable that benefits many.
Experience representing customer needs in product planning and shifting engineering priorities using technical evidence and business impact.
High agency and comfort with ambiguity, as the team will define its own playbook.
Judgement and emotional intelligence to hold difficult conversations with customers while maintaining relationships and truth.
Familiarity with the Windows app platform (WinUI, WPF, .NET desktop) and application modernization.
Evidence of learning hard things fast; a solid track record of acquiring depth quickly is valued.

Responsibilities

Own forward-deployed engagements end to end, including discovery, building solutions, and validation.
Embed with customer engineering organizations to understand their development workflows, constraints, and adoption blockers.
Establish clear technical problem statements, baselines, success measures, and plans.
Design and implement solutions alongside customer engineers, writing automation, configuration, provisioning logic, integrations, and reference implementations.
Apply real engineering standards (security, privacy, maintainability, supportability) to work that will outlive the engagement.
Prove improvements in the customer's environment through agreed-upon measurements.
Be the team's authority on enterprise-scale Windows development, including WSL and WSLC, containers, virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration, toolchain and build performance, CI and inner-loop latency, and identity, security, and endpoint-policy controls.
Diagnose and fix friction points that drive developer populations off Windows, whether they originate in the platform, enterprise configuration, tooling, or gaps between them.
Build production-ready artifacts such as configuration baselines, provisioning automation, diagnostic tooling, and reference environments.
Close the loop with product engineering by bringing rigorous evidence (reproductions, traces, measurements, business impact) back to Windows, WSL, developer tooling, and security product teams to influence their development.
Drive fixes, supportability improvements, and telemetry additions through to shipping, maintaining accountability for customer outcomes.
Identify repeating patterns across customers and convert them into playbooks, reference configurations, tooling, and guidance for broader application.
Transfer expertise to other FDEs, Microsoft field and support teams, and product groups.
Deliver measurable adoption outcomes through production developer workloads, telemetry, customer evidence, or agreed success measures.
Build trusted relationships with customer technical leaders, platform teams, and developers.
Clearly communicate findings, tradeoffs, risks, and progress to customer engineers, engineering leaders, Microsoft field teams, and executives.