Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft
Builds workplace software, PCs and cloud services
The AI Transformation team within Microsoft Frontier Company is reimagining how the company operates in the age of AI. We work across the business to transform critical end-to-end workflows, bringing people, AI agents, and systems together to create fundamentally new ways of working.Our team brings together engineering, applied AI, program leadership, and business transformation to move rapidly from opportunity to working solution. We operate with a builder mindset: hands-on, highly collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity, and biased toward action. Our goal is not simply to add AI to existing processes, but to build AI-native operating models and reusable solutions that improve how Microsoft Frontier Company works and accelerate transformation at scale.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will bring strong software design and engineering expertise to build AI-powered solutions that transform how Microsoft Frontier Company operates. You’ll work in small, multidisciplinary teams to rapidly move from prototype to production, using AI and agentic coding tools to build reliable applications, agents, integrations, and workflows that deliver measurable operational impact.
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.
Understand User Requirements
Partners with stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios. Leverages a variety of feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs or solution fixes. Leads incorporation of appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value. Begins to determine additional critical metrics.
Design
Leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Creates proposals for architecture and design documents and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the other team members. Leads the development of design documents for designs or User Stories and determines the technology that will be leveraged and how they will interact. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions. Leads efforts to assure system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations.
Independently creates and mentors' others for a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring the quality of solutions, and defines success for outcomes of tests (e.g., unit tests). Identifies needs for a broad versus selected approach in testing mechanisms and makes informed decisions to implement the most effective tests. Leads efforts to add new tests, remove antiquated tests, and aggregate tests to improve the overall test suite. Improves recommendations to the team and augments test cases to ensure that solutions have good test coverage. Leads efforts to continually integrate automation features when planning for testing.
Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform. Leads identification of other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's own system may provide support to others. Leads efforts to determine back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product. Demonstrates deep understanding of up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, driving reliability in the solutions, and optimize dependency chains and retrieves across teams. Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. Enables cross team communications and resolves conflicts between teams.
Coding
Leads by example and mentors' others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices.
Leads efforts to apply knowledge of debugging tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and leads verification of assumptions through writing and developing code proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur across products. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations. Leads retrospective debugging of solutions to identify root causes of problems.
Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft’s quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area. Applies feedback to current and future iterations. Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices.
Implement
Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates any issue that would cause a major delay.
Leads efforts for creation and conducting of experimentation to determine the effectiveness of changes, monitors developments for prototyping and testing products, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value.
Leads the creation of implementation framework as necessary, following industry standards. Leads implementation and deployment of the solution in the existing framework. Holds accountability for the impact of build deployments on both users and other services. Optimizes deployments within products and components to meet differing business objectives. Leads efforts to assure that solutions are deployed safely.
Reliability and Supportability
Maintains operations of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Implements and helps others implement solutions and mitigations to complex issues impacting the performance or functionality of Live Site services. Reviews and writes issues postmortem and shares insights with the team.
Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and mentors' other engineers across products/solutions, working on call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for complex issues. Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues. Coordinates people and resources to ensure DRI responsibilities are covered across teams. Responds within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe. Has line of sight to incidences and plans to address emerging issues. Leads efforts to reduce incident volume, looking globally at incidences and providing broad resolutions. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.
Integrates, designs, and reviews others' work across a team or product to integrate instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms. Drives sustaining feedback loops from telemetry resulting in subsequent designs. Ensures solutions are scalable, financially responsible, and meet capture/storage guidelines. Leads the creation of outputs of telemetry such as notifications or dashboards.
Leads efforts to collect, classify, and analyze complex data and analyses on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring). Leads the refinement of products through data analytics and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration.
Engineering Excellence
Leads efforts to enhance, reuse, contribute to, and identify new software developer tools to support other programs and applications to create, debug, and maintain code across products. Uses open source when possible. Develops substantial skills in other tools inside and outside areas of expertise. Leads identification of internal tools and creation of new tools that will be useful for creating the product, determining if methods are still applicable for the current solution. Shares best practices and teaches others about new tools and strategies.
Considers and leads the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products. Defines and develops standardized, repeatable, scalable solutions to guarantee quality.
Leads efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams. Creates and assures the presence of visible evidence to demonstrate compliance for products. Develops and maintains a deep understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft.
Remains current by investing time and effort into staying abreast of current developments. 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.
Applies, extrapolates, and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers to reliably build code that is based on well-established methods while also applying best practices for new code development. Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are followed and met. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations.
Leads efforts to identify key partners and maintains communication with key partners across the Microsoft ecosystem of engineers. Acts as a key contact for leadership to ensure alignment with partners' expectations. Builds partner teams across Microsoft (e.g., Xbox, Office) and their end-goals for products to drive and achieve desirable user experiences and fitting dynamic needs of partners/customers through product development. Escalates situations internally to resolve complex blockers.
Required/Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical discipline 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.
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
OR master's 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 equivalent experience.
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.
Microsoft builds workplace software, operating systems and cloud infrastructure for consumers, businesses and government agencies, from small organizations to global enterprises. Microsoft 365 combines Word and Excel with Teams communication and Copilot AI features, while Windows runs PCs and Surface supplies the company's own computers. Azure rents computing capacity, storage and databases to build and run web applications. Microsoft also sells Xbox consoles and games, collecting revenue through software licenses, subscriptions, usage charges and product sales. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington.
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