Software Engineer II

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

3d • $102,100 - $202,200

About The Position

Microsoft is hiring a hands-on Software Engineer II to build and operate platform features that help engineering teams build and run software more simply. The role focuses on turning complex infrastructure into easy-to-use capabilities, making reliability and security defaults, and applying AI to reduce engineering toil. The components developed will support teams across the organization and address scalability, performance, observability, and developer experience.

The engineer will own well-scoped parts of the platform, take features from design through deployment and ongoing operation, and work with senior engineers and partner teams. The position includes exploring intelligent automation and AI-assisted or agent-based capabilities for engineering workflows, helping evaluate them for trustworthiness, and contributing to production reliability and safe delivery. 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 at least 2 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.
• Curiosity, willingness to question existing approaches, interest in automating repetitive work, and care for building reliable systems.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and at least 3 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 at least 5 years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience building and operating production services or distributed systems.
• Experience building or contributing to internal platforms, shared services, or developer tools used by other teams.
• Hands-on experience integrating large language models or agents into applications or engineering workflows.
• Familiarity with designing APIs or workflows usable by both human developers and AI agents.
• Experience in a platform area such as service frameworks, data infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, experimentation, configuration management, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience using telemetry, profiling, or production debugging to identify and resolve performance or reliability issues.
• Experience contributing to migrations or modernizing existing systems.
• Experience turning prototypes or proofs of concept into production features.
• Interest in applying AI to engineering work, with the ability to use AI tools effectively and assess their correctness, security, and reliability critically.
• Record of delivering features from design through production and working effectively within a team.
• Ability to break loosely defined problems into clear, practical technical tasks.
• Good communication and collaboration skills, including explaining technical choices and being open to feedback.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and ship core platform components that meet engineering teams’ needs, with guidance from senior engineers on larger architectural decisions.
• Help build and evaluate AI-assisted and agent-based features for workflows such as troubleshooting, testing, migrations, and operational analysis.
• Work with partner teams to understand challenges, gather feedback, and turn common problems into self-service features.
• Contribute to automated validation, progressive rollout, observability, and recovery tools that support safe production delivery.
• Deliver well-scoped features from design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation, including on-call support and production issue resolution.
• Collaborate with team engineers and partner teams to clarify requirements, discuss technical tradeoffs, and raise risks early.
• Write clean, well-tested code; participate in code and design reviews; share learnings; and contribute to continuous improvement.

What This Job Offers

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