Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Overview

Windows is where most of the worlds developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. Coding agents, local inference, containerized toolchains and AI-native workflows are all arriving at once - and the engineering organizations adopting them fastest are the ones whose experience should be shaping Windows.

The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close that loop directly. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers inside their environments, and own the outcome: the customers developers and agents running production workloads on Windows.

We are measured on adoption. Not revenue, not renewals, not tickets closed. When a customers engineering organization moves a real workload onto Windows and keeps it there, that is the result.

This is a founding team. The engineers who join it will define the engagement model rather than inherit one.

As a Senior Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you will own engagements end to end - discovery through production - and carry the teams depth on agentic workloads on Windows: coding agents, agent runtimes, local and hybrid inference, and the AI-native development loops that partners and enterprise engineering teams are standing up right now. You are the person who can sit with a customers platform team, understand why their agents run worse on Windows than elsewhere, and then go fix it - in their code, in ours, or in both.

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.

Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

Own forward-deployed engagements end to end

• Discover: embed with a customers engineering organization to understand their development workflow, their constraints, and what is actually blocking adoption. Establish a clear technical problem statement, a baseline, agreed success measures, and a plan.
• Build: design and implement solutions alongside the customers engineers. Write the automation, configuration, provisioning logic, integrations and reference implementations. Apply real engineering standards - security, privacy, maintainability, supportability - to work that will outlive the engagement.
• Validate: prove the improvement in the customers environment with measurement they agree with, not with a demo.

Carry the teams depth on the developer platform

• Be the teams authority on how real development happens on Windows at enterprise scale: WSL and WSLC, containers and virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration, toolchain and build performance, CI and inner-loop latency, and the identity, security and endpoint-policy controls that constrain all of it.
• Diagnose the friction that drives developer populations off Windows - whether it originates in the platform, in enterprise configuration, in tooling, or in a gap between them - and fix it at the right layer.
• Build the artifacts customers deploy in production: configuration baselines, provisioning automation, diagnostic tooling, reference environments.

Close the loop with product engineering

• Bring evidence back to Windows, WSL, developer tooling and security product teams with enough rigour - reproductions, traces, measurements, business impact - that it changes what they build.
• Drive fixes, supportability improvements and telemetry additions through to shipping. You keep accountability for the customer outcome, not just the handoff.

Scale what works

• Identify the patterns that repeat across customers and convert them into playbooks, reference configurations, tooling and guidance that serve a far larger population than the accounts you touched.
• Transfer expertise to other FDEs, to Microsoft field and support teams, and to product groups, so each engagement raises the capability of everyone around it.

Deliver measurable adoption outcomes

• Demonstrate adoption through production developer workloads, telemetry, customer evidence or agreed success measures.
• Build trusted relationships with customer technical leaders, platform teams and the developers themselves - the kind where you get told what is really wrong.
• Communicate findings, tradeoffs, risks and progress clearly to customer engineers, engineering leaders, Microsoft field teams and executives.

Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ 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

• Production experience building or deploying systems powered by large language models (LLMs) - agent development, prompt and context engineering, evaluation frameworks, tool and MCP integration, and deployment at scale.
• Solid programming ability in Python and at least one of TypeScript, C#, Rust, Go, C or C++, with a record of shipping production software.
• Experience in a customer-facing engineering role - forward deployed engineering, field engineering, technical consulting, escalation engineering, solutions architecture, or as a technical founder - working directly with another organizations engineers in their environment.
• Technical knowledge of the Windows developer platform, including several of: Windows Subsytem for Linus (WSL), containers and virtualization, developer environment and configuration, toolchain and build performance, local inference and hardware acceleration, and the security and policy controls that shape developer machines in an enterprise.
• Experience diagnosing performance and reliability problems using structured methods - telemetry, traces, profiling, Windows Performance Analyzer or comparable tooling - in systems you did not write.
• Demonstrated ability to turn a solution built for one customer into something repeatable that benefits many.
• Experience representing customer needs in product planning and shifting engineering priorities using technical evidence and business impact.
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity - this team does not yet have a playbook, and the first people here will write it.
• The judgement and emotional intelligence to hold a hard conversation with a customer without losing the relationship or the truth.
• Familiarity with the Windows app platform - WinUI, WPF, .NET desktop - and with application modernization. Not required for this role, but valuable when a customers adoption conversation turns to their existing app estate.
• Evidence of learning hard things fast. We do not expect anyone to arrive with every skill listed here. A solid track record of acquiring depth quickly counts as much as depth you already have.

#W+DJOBS

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.