Software Engineer II
About The Position
Microsoft is seeking a Software Engineer II to join the Special Projects and Resources Team (SPARTANs) in M365 Core – Substrate. Substrate is the data and intelligence platform underlying Microsoft 365, enabling partner teams to build, operate, and modernize compliant and reliable services at global scale. SPARTANs address strategic projects and difficult engineering problems across M365 Core, removing barriers to agility, modernization, and AI acceleration for engineers throughout Substrate. The team establishes outcome-oriented missions that unblock critical programs in modernization, resilience, cost optimization, compliance, and developer productivity. In this role, you will work across services and codebases to solve scoped portions of complex engineering problems. You will collaborate with experienced engineers and partner teams to understand unfamiliar systems, develop and validate solutions, and deliver measurable improvements. The role offers an opportunity to strengthen distributed-systems expertise while contributing to high-impact Microsoft 365 projects. The team values service, technical curiosity, sound engineering judgment, collaboration, continuous learning, and measurable customer impact.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 2+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
- Alternatively, a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 3+ years of technical engineering experience coding in the listed or similar languages, or equivalent experience.
- Alternatively, a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 5+ years of technical engineering experience coding in the listed or similar languages, 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.
- Experience designing, implementing, testing, or debugging production software.
- Experience collaborating with others to deliver software features or engineering improvements.
- Experience designing and developing reliable distributed systems, cloud services, or platform components.
- Experience owning a software feature or service component from design through production deployment.
- Experience diagnosing production issues using logs, metrics, distributed tracing, debuggers, profilers, or similar diagnostic tools.
- Experience measuring and improving service latency, scalability, resource utilization, reliability, or operational cost.
- Experience writing automated unit, integration, performance, or reliability tests.
- Experience working in large codebases and ramping up on unfamiliar systems.
- Experience with Azure or another public cloud platform.
Responsibilities
- Ramp up on unfamiliar services and codebases, understanding their architecture, dependencies, and operational characteristics.
- Work with senior engineers and partner teams to turn open-ended engineering problems into scoped deliverables with clear success criteria.
- Design, implement, test, and deploy software advancing SPARTANs missions in modernization, resilience, cost optimization, compliance, and developer productivity.
- Own features and technical deliverables from design through deployment, validation, and measurement of impact.
- Diagnose and address performance, latency, scalability, reliability, and cost issues in distributed services.
- Use telemetry, profiling, debugging, and experimentation to form hypotheses and make evidence-based engineering decisions.
- Write clean, secure, testable, and observable code using languages such as C#, Java, C++, Rust, or other appropriate technologies.
- Collaborate across repository, service, and organizational boundaries to coordinate dependencies and land changes safely.
- Communicate technical progress, risks, decisions, and tradeoffs clearly to engineering partners and stakeholders.
- Seek feedback, learn from production issues, and share knowledge with the broader engineering community.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional information is available through the Microsoft careers pay and benefits page.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
