Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

5d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Join Microsoft 365 Core Data Access in Redmond, the Bay Area, or New York to build the query, blob, and data-access services behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot. Microsoft's Substrate is a large-scale cloud platform that supports Microsoft 365 productivity, collaboration, and AI experiences. The team builds services and libraries connecting Microsoft 365 applications, including Search and Copilot, to Substrate data. Its work spans distributed services, gRPC and other service APIs, and C# and Rust client libraries, with a focus on performance, reliability, security, privacy, and developer experience.

This is an individual contributor role for an engineer who enjoys distributed systems challenges and building software used by other engineers. You will own features and components from design through production, make technical trade-offs, and collaborate with partner teams to deliver maintainable solutions. The role combines hands-on development with technical leadership through design reviews, mentoring, and improvements to engineering practices.

You will work in a collaborative team that values curiosity, accountability, continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and different perspectives. Production data and customer feedback inform the team's decisions. The role offers an opportunity to deepen expertise in large-scale systems and improve the platforms behind Microsoft 365 experiences.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 2 or more years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as 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 3 or more years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or bachelor's degree in the field and 5 or more years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design principles.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed services in production, including on-call work, incident response, safe deployment, and telemetry-driven diagnosis.
• Experience designing APIs, client libraries, or platforms used by other engineering teams, including RPC frameworks such as gRPC.
• Experience with storage systems, query engines, or other data-intensive services.
• Experience owning a component from design through operation, coordinating dependencies across teams, and mentoring engineers.
• Familiarity with security, authorization, privacy, and compliance in cloud services.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and partner teams to understand customer needs and translate them into clear technical requirements.
• Lead the technical design and delivery of components across data-access services, including a query service operating across sharded Microsoft 365 data, a blob service, and a gRPC service exposing the core mailbox store; evaluate trade-offs, dependencies, and risks, and document decisions.
• Write, test, review, and maintain high-quality code, with attention to correctness, performance, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Design and evolve service APIs, including gRPC APIs, and C# and Rust client libraries; help partner teams adopt and integrate them.
• Own production health through monitoring, safe deployments, and participation in the on-call rotation; diagnose incidents, address root causes, and improve operational readiness.
• Use telemetry, profiling, and customer feedback to improve reliability, scalability, performance, and resource efficiency.
• Mentor engineers, provide constructive code and design reviews, and share knowledge to strengthen engineering practices and technical judgment.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the Microsoft careers website.

What This Job Offers

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