Principal Software Engineer

Overview

The Trusted Servicing Experiences / Supportability & Customer-Centric Engagement and Engineering Direct Team is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the architecture for secure, enterprise-scale platforms spanning supportability, customer-centric engineering, escalation intelligence, and operational analytics.

You’ll set the technical direction across interconnected software, data, and agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems—building AI harnesses and sandbox environments, architecting distributed backend services, and creating reusable AI capabilities. Operating with broad autonomy, you’ll align multiple teams and establish durable foundations for security, privacy, scale, and enterprise adoption.

At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Lead adoption of AI-native engineering practices in SDLC, including Responsible AI controls for AI-generated design/code artifacts and workflow automation.
• Influence strategic prioritization with data-driven recommendations, KPI frameworks, and experimentation-informed decisions.
• Define and own end-to-end architecture for software and data platforms supporting engineering health, supportability, customer escalation, and operational intelligence.
• Lead architecture and design reviews for complex, distributed services and data systems, including tradeoff decisions across scalability, resiliency, performance, security, privacy, and cost.
• Establish architecture patterns, standards, and guardrails for code quality, testing strategy, observability, deployment safety, and dependency management across teams.
• Architect and govern data foundations including data models, schemas, lineage, contracts, semantic layers, quality controls, and governance mechanisms.
• Drive telemetry-first engineering: instrumentation, monitoring, anomaly detection, root-cause workflows, and incident prevention practices.
• Lead live-site reliability strategy, including Direct Responsible Individual (DRI) readiness, service health indicators, failure mode analysis, postmortems, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Partner with product management, engineering, support/escalation, and leadership stakeholders to translate ambiguous business needs into clear architecture roadmaps and milestones.
• Lead cross-team dependency planning and execution; negotiate ownership boundaries and align partner teams to shared delivery outcomes.
• Ensure compliance and auditability by embedding secure-by-design, least-privilege, data handling controls, and regulatory requirements into architecture and operations.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads; raise architectural quality and decision velocity through clear technical direction and reusable patterns.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's 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

• 10+ years of technical engineering experience, including 5+ years owning architecture for complex, distributed enterprise systems and data platforms.
• Experience architecting and delivering large, business-critical initiatives from design through production operations.
• Hands-on backend engineering expertise, including coding, testing, debugging, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Experience building enterprise AI platforms, including AI harnesses, sandbox environments, and reusable capabilities using frameworks (e.g. AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, LangGraph, etc.)
• Experience developing production-grade agentic AI systems that reason over data, operate across distributed systems, and generate automated insights.
• Proven track record leading end-to-end architecture for at least two large, business-critical initiatives spanning design, build, deployment, and operations.
• Deep hands-on expertise in software engineering fundamentals (coding, design, testing, debugging, reliability, and maintainability).
• Deep data engineering experience, including Python/PySpark, ETL/ELT pipelines, data modeling, quality, governance, lineage, and large-scale analytics platforms.
• Expertise in security, privacy, compliance, least-privilege controls, auditability, and secure deployment within enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated ability to align teams, influence technical roadmaps, establish reusable architecture standards, and mentor senior engineers.

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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.

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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.