Network Systems Engineer
About the job
- A master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field and 3 or more years of technical engineering experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of those fields and 5 or more years of technical engineering experience; or equivalent experience.
- At least 5 years of experience developing or validating networking, compute, storage, or accelerator hardware systems.
- At least 5 years of experience designing, integrating, validating, or troubleshooting Ethernet-based networking infrastructure, including switches, network interface cards, optical components, physical-layer devices, or high-speed Serializer/Deserializer technologies.
- At least 5 years of experience supporting artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, cloud, or large-scale data center infrastructure deployments.
- 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.
- Develop and integrate scale-up and scale-out networking solutions for MAIA artificial intelligence training and inference systems.
- Translate artificial intelligence and machine learning workload requirements into system-level networking requirements.
- Evaluate architecture tradeoffs across performance, reliability, power, scalability, serviceability, and cost.
- Drive integration, bring-up, and qualification of switches, network interface cards, physical-layer devices, media access control and physical coding sublayer components, Serializer/Deserializer technologies, optical components, cables, and backplane technologies.
- Collaborate across silicon, firmware, hardware, software, and operating-system teams to resolve complex integration issues.
- Partner with technology vendors, original design manufacturers, and contract manufacturers through qualification and production readiness.
- Develop end-to-end validation strategies covering functionality, performance, scale, interoperability, reliability, and stress.
- Characterize artificial intelligence fabric performance, including bandwidth, latency, link utilization, congestion behavior, and communication efficiency.
- Develop validation methodologies for rack-scale and cluster-scale artificial intelligence infrastructure.
- Drive qualification of next-generation electrical and optical networking technologies, including high-speed Serializer/Deserializer technologies, copper interconnects, optical modules, and high-density connectivity.
- Evaluate technologies such as four-level pulse-amplitude modulation Serializer/Deserializer, direct-attach copper and active electrical cables, OSFP/QSFP-DD, advanced optical interconnects, linear pluggable optics, linear receive optics, co-packaged optics, and silicon photonics.
- Analyze system-level tradeoffs across performance, power, reliability, signal and link integrity, and scalability.
- Lead root-cause analysis of complex networking issues across physical-layer devices, Serializer/Deserializer technologies, media access control and physical coding sublayer components, switches, network interface cards, firmware, and system software.
- Develop and improve telemetry, diagnostics, validation automation, and network health monitoring.
- Use laboratory characterization and system telemetry to drive issues to resolution and improve platform reliability.
- Experience with graphics processing units, field-programmable gate arrays, tensor processing units, or custom artificial intelligence accelerator systems supporting artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.
- Experience with scale-up and scale-out artificial intelligence networking and distributed artificial intelligence infrastructure.
- Electrical networking expertise in areas such as 112G/224G Serializer/Deserializer, four-level pulse-amplitude modulation, media access control and physical coding sublayer, forward error correction, link training, signal integrity, digital-to-analog converters, and active electrical cables, or optical expertise in areas such as OSFP/QSFP-DD, active optical cables, optical transceivers, optical link characterization, and diagnostics.
- Familiarity with optical technologies such as DR4/DR8/FR4, optical link budgets, optical modulation amplitude, TDECQ, receiver sensitivity, linear pluggable optics, linear receive optics, co-packaged optics, and silicon photonics.
- Understanding of artificial intelligence workload communication patterns, network collectives, traffic profiles, and congestion behavior.
- Familiarity with IEEE Ethernet, Optical Internetworking Forum, Common Management Interface Specification, and emerging artificial intelligence networking technologies.
- Experience with Linux, telemetry, diagnostics, scripting, test automation, and network qualification.
- Experience with hyperscale data center infrastructure and hardware development from prototype through production.
About the company
Microsoft develops software, devices, and cloud services. Windows is an operating system that runs on personal computers, Office provides productivity apps, and Azure offers cloud computing and developer tools. The company differentiates itself with a large, integrated ecosystem of software, devices, and services, plus long-standing partnerships with PC makers and a broad enterprise footprint. Its goal is to put a computer on every desk and in every home, and to extend that reach through cloud services, professional networking (LinkedIn), and gaming.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Redmond, Washington
Founded
1975
Get referred to Microsoft
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Azure surpassed $100 billion annual revenue in July 2026, proving hyperscale momentum.
- Microsoft Cloud revenue hit $59.3 billion in fiscal Q4 2026, up 27% year over year.
- Commercial RPO reached $678 billion, locking in multiyear demand through 2027.
What critics are saying
- OpenAI's Dots and GPT-6 Astra challenge Microsoft's agent-control layer by late 2026.
- Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs on July 6, 2026, signaling deeper Xbox and commercial strain.
- Peter Lee and Ryan Roslansky leave in 2026, weakening leadership continuity across AI and productivity.
What makes Microsoft unique
- Microsoft owns Azure, Office, GitHub, LinkedIn, and Defender under one enterprise stack.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot reached 30 million paid seats by July 2026.
- Fabric, Foundry, and Entra turn Microsoft into the default AI control plane.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
401(k) Company Match
Professional Development Budget
Conference Attendance Budget
Flexible Work Hours
Remote Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 0%1 year growth
↑ 0%2 year growth
↑ 0%Ryan Roslansky, Microsoft's executive vice president and former LinkedIn CEO, will leave the company at the end of 2026. Roslansky, who joined LinkedIn in 2009 and became CEO in 2020, cited family ties to the San Francisco Bay Area as his reason for departing. He will remain as an adviser to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella through December. His exit follows a string of executive departures at Microsoft, including gaming chief Phil Spencer and Office executive Rajesh Jha. Roslansky moved into Microsoft 365 oversight earlier this year after Dan Shapero became LinkedIn's CEO. During Roslansky's six-year tenure leading LinkedIn, membership grew from 700 million to 1.3 billion users. LinkedIn posted 11% revenue growth for Microsoft's most recent fiscal year.
askpolly, an AI-powered market research platform, has integrated with Microsoft Copilot Cowork, allowing companies to combine social insights with sales data without uploading sensitive information to the cloud. The Ottawa-based company converts organic social media conversations into statistically valid market research in as little as two minutes. Through askpolly's API, users can merge social data with sales information directly within Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power BI, or Copilot. The platform filters out bots, influencers, and paid content before creating representative samples matched to census demographics, with underlying data refreshing every 24 hours. Anyone with a current Copilot subscription can download askpolly through Microsoft Marketplace. The platform is trusted by more than 200 companies for audience analysis, message testing, and sales forecasting.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding answers from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft over $96 billion in lost federal revenue from AI-related tax breaks. Despite reporting massive revenues in Q2 2026, the tech giants saw significant tax reductions last year. Amazon paid $7.8 billion less in tax, Meta nearly $7 billion less, whilst Microsoft and Alphabet each qualified for roughly $19 billion in tax cuts. The companies are benefiting from provisions in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including 100% bonus depreciation for AI data centres and expanded R&D tax credits. Corporate tax revenues have dropped 23% this year, largely due to these AI tax breaks. Warren and fellow lawmakers have sent letters to the companies' CEOs questioning the tax breaks and their lobbying efforts, arguing the costs have been imposed on American families through cuts to Social Security and other programmes.
Microsoft Science President Peter Lee is stepping down from the company, he announced on Wednesday. Lee, a veteran who led Microsoft's internal research unit for several years, is the latest senior executive to depart this year. The announcement follows other high-profile exits in 2025, including Office and Windows boss Rajesh Jha and Xbox CEO. Lee's departure marks a continuation of significant leadership changes at the technology giant, though no details about his future plans or replacement have been disclosed.
Patriot Consulting has launched a free cost evaluation service for Microsoft's new Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC), aimed at Microsoft 365 E5 and E7 customers. ISOC integrates SIEM capabilities into Microsoft Defender, offering 90 days of data retention from 15 November 2026 and a $2.40 per GB ingestion rate for non-Microsoft data starting 1 October 2026. The evaluation compares organisations' current licensing, log volumes and tiering against ISOC's pricing to provide tenant-specific recommendations. Patriot guarantees quotes within 24 hours and may leverage Microsoft funding to offset consulting fees. Patriot also offers MXDR365, a 24x7 managed detection and response service featuring seven proprietary agents and automated playbooks for threat intelligence, hunting, log analysis and identity protection. The service works alongside ISOC's unified signals and context platform.