Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

10d

About The Position

COSMIC, part of Microsoft 365 Substrate Core, is modernizing Microsoft’s compute platform with capabilities such as geo-presence, security, high availability, fault isolation, and automated cloud buildout. The platform helps improve service agility, reliability, compliance, and cost efficiency across large Kubernetes fleets.

The Senior Software Engineer will build autonomous operational capabilities for COSMIC. The role owns significant features and services that let AI agents coordinate and safely execute fleet-scale operational workflows, including deployment, capacity, resiliency, recovery, optimization, evaluation, and continuous learning. The engineer will work with product managers, architects, and engineers across COSMIC, taking problems from design through production, making technical decisions, using production signals to improve systems, and providing technical leadership to other engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 4+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, or Rust.
• 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

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor’s degree in a related field and 8+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems, cloud services, or Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
• Experience owning complex features or services from design through production, including reliability, instrumentation, and supportability.
• Experience with production AI or agent systems, workflow orchestration, control planes, or intelligent automation.
• Experience implementing safety, policy, identity, authorization, observability, evaluation, or approval mechanisms for automated systems.
• Solid coding, debugging, testing, and systems design skills, with attention to maintainability and operational quality.
• Experience using telemetry, experiments, and customer feedback to improve product and system outcomes.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and collaborate effectively across engineering and product disciplines.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, implementation, rollout, and operation of significant COSMIC App Platform features and services from requirements through production.
• Build distributed platform and orchestration components that enable AI agents to coordinate and execute deployment, capacity, resiliency, recovery, and optimization workflows at fleet scale.
• Design safety boundaries, including sandbox isolation, scoped identity and access, policy and approval checks, auditable execution, rollback, blast-radius containment, and human oversight.
• Drive production readiness through health-gated releases, observability, alerts, runbooks, on-call support, and incident follow-up.
• Build evaluation, experimentation, feedback, and learning loops with measurable system-quality and operational outcomes.
• Translate customer and operational needs into sound designs, testable software, and clear success criteria; resolve cross-team dependencies and deliver end-to-end scenarios.
• Investigate complex production issues using telemetry and data, identify root causes, and deliver durable fixes that improve reliability and supportability.
• Lead feature-level technical reviews, contribute to architecture and roadmap decisions, mentor engineers through design and code reviews, and improve reusable engineering patterns and tooling.

What This Job Offers

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