Senior/Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

13d•$119,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Within CoreAI, Foundry IQ powers knowledge experiences for applications and agentic workloads by bringing together content understanding, search relevance, and diverse knowledge sources. The Principal Software Engineer shapes the end-to-end customer and developer experience for FoundryIQ, setting technical direction across product and service boundaries and turning ambiguous opportunities into durable outcomes. The role helps customers discover, adopt, and succeed with secure, reliable AI capabilities at global scale. The position calls for a principled technical leader who can exercise sound judgment amid ambiguity and changing customer needs, technology, and business priorities. The engineer raises engineering standards by creating clarity, building alignment, and enabling teams to move quickly without compromising security, reliability, or maintainability. The role connects customer and internal developer needs with product and engineering strategy, and influences developer adoption and operation of enterprise-ready AI workloads. The role advances engineering excellence throughout the product lifecycle. Its scope includes UX flows, agentic harnesses, samples, SDKs, and web services, with emphasis on scalable practices and continuous learning. Success is measured through durable organization-level outcomes, such as faster developer onboarding and delivery, increased adoption of platform capabilities, improved engineering health, reduced operational risk, and stronger technical practices.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of technical engineering experience building and operating cloud services, 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

4+ years of technical leadership and architecture at product scope.
Experience owning end-to-end customer and developer experiences across one or more product surfaces, including defining requirements and driving delivery.
Experience with distributed systems and engineering systems.
Experience designing and delivering secure services, including identity and access patterns and privacy and compliance considerations.
Experience leading AI-assisted engineering tools to improve software development lifecycle quality and velocity, including responsible use of AI-generated assets for an organization.
Strong customer empathy and a track record of using qualitative and quantitative feedback to iterate product experiences.
Ability to create significant impact within intricate codebases and large organizations.
Experience building AI-powered product capabilities and/or search, retrieval, or data and knowledge services at scale.

Responsibilities

Lead adoption and continuous improvement of AI tools and Responsible AI practices across the software development lifecycle; establish accountability for AI-generated assets, define scalable processes and tools, use engineering health metrics, and share organizational learnings.
Set technical direction for production services and improve engineering quality through automation, analysis, debugging, telemetry, and retrospectives.
Strengthen diagnosability, incident prevention, secure and privacy-preserving operations, least-privilege practices, and code quality.
Raise the organization’s technical and engineering bar by defining and modeling principled practices, mentoring technical leaders, and creating reusable mechanisms that improve quality, velocity, and operational discipline at scale.
Build an inclusive and safe engineering culture that provides clarity, autonomy, and accountability; model constructive technical debate, encourage learning from outcomes, and create opportunities for others to lead.
Create clarity as goals, customer needs, technologies, and constraints evolve; reframe ambiguous problems, communicate changes in direction, and help teams adapt and maintain momentum.
Lead cross-group planning and execution by translating long-term vision and ambiguous problems into decisions, milestones, and measurable outcomes; drive estimation and capacity planning, negotiate scope and technical tradeoffs, resolve blockers, and adjust execution as needed.
Balance delivery speed with security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and operational readiness; establish validation, flighting, rollback, incident response, and disaster recovery practices, and use operational evidence to reduce risk.
Partner with internal and external developers, customers, and stakeholders to validate requirements, technical feasibility, and product outcomes.
Translate qualitative feedback, usage data, and success metrics into prioritized improvements, including accessibility, globalization, security, and privacy requirements.
Influence technical strategy and product direction across teams without formal authority; build shared understanding, surface disagreements early, and secure commitment to cohesive, enterprise-ready experiences.