Principal Software Engineer

Overview

As organizations fully embrace cloud computing and move mission critical workloads into Microsoft Azure, the cloud infrastructure and platform are facing ever increasing challenges and requirements for reliability, performance, and scalability.

If you are curious in understanding such challenges and are passionate about shaping next generation cloud technologies to systematically improve the core cloud architecture, this is the right team for you.

Azure Core is the engine of Microsoft's Cloud, powering infrastructure that is the foundation for cloud computing. As a Principal Software Engineer in the Azure core engineering team, you will innovate with top notch colleagues and develop the latest cloud technologies. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, work firsthand with customers globally, and uplift the entire cloud industry. There are flexible work opportunities, and you can work from home partially.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Work with internal and external stakeholders to understand challenges and identify opportunities.
• Define and plan technology requirements and solutions to resolve complex end-to-end business and engineering challenges.
• Drive the architecture plan, review, and development. This would entail both understanding and helping the customer define their solution architecture on the Azure platform, as well as:
• Driving issue or gap resolution across the Azure teams as they are encountered.
• Driving systemic improvements across Azure or proactively identifying feature gaps/capabilities and working across teams to ensure customers are enabled.
• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple groups project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• Expertise in one of the cloud platform areas, such as compute, network, and storage on Azure and/or competitive cloud technologies.

• Architecture design skills for complicated large-scale software systems.

• Data platform skills with telemetry pipelines, semantic data modeling, and knowledge graphs.

• Customer mindset and ability to reason from customer needs and operational reality to platform design and engineering priorities.

• Demonstrated:

• ability to lead through ambiguity, define technical direction, and align engineering, product, operations, and partner teams around measurable outcomes.

• technical leadership through mentoring, design reviews, cross-team influence, incident learning, and raising engineering quality standards.

• Experience with/in the following:

• building production-grade agentic systems,

• establishing AI quality and safety mechanisms,

• applying AI to cloud operations,

• Azure services and secure deployment practices,

• applied AI/ML or generative AI systems, including at least several of the following: LLM integration, RAG, embeddings, prompt/context engineering, AI evaluation, classification models, semantic search, or agent frameworks.

#azurecorejobs

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.