Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

3d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Microsoft is hiring a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to build the next generation of its engineering platform, making software development and operations simpler through reliable, secure, scalable, and easy-to-use infrastructure. The role focuses on distributed systems and applying AI to engineering workflows, including intelligent automation that reduces operational overhead and helps engineers work more effectively.

The engineer will design and build production systems, own significant platform components end to end, and contribute to technical direction through design reviews and collaboration with partner teams. Work includes taking ideas from prototype to production, solving challenges in scalability, performance, observability, and developer experience, and building capabilities that improve engineering productivity. The role also involves mentoring engineers and promoting reliable, disciplined engineering practices.

Microsoft describes its mission as empowering every person and organization to achieve more, and emphasizes growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

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

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding, or a bachelor’s degree in the field and 8+ years of such experience, or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or shared platform services in production.
• Experience building platform components or developer tools used by multiple teams that improved engineering productivity, service reliability, or operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience integrating large language models or agents into engineering workflows, including tool integration, evaluation, permission boundaries, and human oversight.
• Experience building interfaces and workflows for both human developers and AI agents, with clear contracts, discoverable capabilities, and auditable execution.
• Depth in at least one platform area, such as service frameworks, data infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, experimentation, configuration management, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience using telemetry, profiling, and production investigations to identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable performance or cost improvements.
• Experience modernizing existing systems through incremental changes and migrations without disrupting customers or partners.
• Ability to balance exploration with practical delivery and turn prototypes into supported, production-ready platform features.
• Solid systems engineering fundamentals, including API design, concurrency, data management, failure handling, and performance analysis.
• An AI-forward engineering mindset, including the ability to identify useful AI applications, implement them in production code, and assess their correctness, security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Record of delivering complex technical projects from design through production, making sound design decisions, and collaborating with other teams to drive adoption.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements and developer needs into practical, maintainable technical solutions.
• Solid communication and collaboration skills, including explaining technical tradeoffs, contributing to design discussions, and helping other engineers grow.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the platform roadmap by identifying gaps, proposing architectural improvements, and connecting designs to engineering teams’ needs.
• Build AI-assisted and agent-based features for engineering workflows such as troubleshooting, testing, migrations, and operational analysis; add evaluations and safeguards to make results trustworthy.
• Work with partner teams to understand their challenges, test solutions, and turn common problems into useful self-service platform features.
• Build automated validation, progressive rollout, observability, and recovery tools to support safer delivery to production.
• Deliver significant platform features from design through implementation, adoption, and ongoing operation; measure developer experience, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders on priorities and technical tradeoffs, clarify ambiguous problems, and develop shared approaches that support independent team evolution.
• Write high-quality code, participate in design reviews, mentor other engineers, and contribute to a culture of curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

What This Job Offers

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