Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft
Builds workplace software, PCs and cloud services
At Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP), we build and continually reinvent the technology behind Microsoft's Customer Service & Support (CSS) and Customer Success Unit (CSU) businesses. We sit inside the Office of the CTO (OCTO), part of MCAPS-Core, where product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners come together around one goal: accelerating customer outcomes and business growth. OCTO shapes where Microsoft invests in emerging technology, sets technical direction, and leads the company's highest-priority AI initiatives, with impact reaching across Microsoft, industry, and society. Engineering carries that mission into the technology behind customer support and success, working alongside ITP's strategy, delivery, and productivity teams, and organized around three pillars of its own: Innovation, Production, and a shared Tech Ops function that keeps every squad running. Joining ITP means turning new ideas into production-ready solutions and running technology on a real scale, so customers get to value faster and strengthen loyalty.
We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer – Pro-Code Server Engineer who is a highly experienced pro-code engineer. This person will raise the bar for how software is built across ITP Engineering. You will lead hands-on technical work on critical, high-impact AI-enabled platforms. You will also make other engineers more effective at pro-code development by mentoring them, defining standards, building tools, and prototyping solutions to the hardest engineering problems.
Much of the platform is built on mature, long-lived codebases. A central challenge is modernizing them while integrating generative AI, agents, retrieval, and intelligent automation. That means understanding existing architecture and behavior, untangling complex dependencies, preserving compatibility, and reducing technical debt. It also means setting up repeatable modernization approaches that other teams can adopt without disrupting customers.
As a Principal-level individual contributor, you will stay close to the code. You will write and review critical production code. You will prototype solutions to hard problems so teams can reduce risk before they commit to an architecture. You will develop the standards and golden paths that define effective pro-code development in ITP, and build or promote tools, including AI-assisted engineering tools, that make engineers more productive. You will be accountable for durable architecture, quality, security, privacy, accessibility, Responsible AI, and the long-term developer experience.
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.
- Pro-code leadership: Stay deeply hands-on: write production code, review critical changes, debug complex failures, and set the example for pro-code craftsmanship.
- Mentoring: Mentor engineers across ITP on effective pro-code practice, covering design, code quality, testing, debugging, secure coding, performance, and AI-assisted development. Do this through code and design reviews, pairing, tech talks, and communities of practice.
- Standards: Develop, publish, and update standards for effective pro-code development. These cover coding conventions, review practices, test automation, CI/CD, observability, secure and Responsible AI development, and AI-assisted coding. Drive adoption and measure it (code health, defect escape rate, lead time).
- Legacy understanding: Build a deep understanding of mature and legacy codebases, including historical design decisions, compatibility requirements, undocumented dependencies, and operational constraints.
- Modernization approaches: Define and share repeatable modernization approaches: architectural seams and strangler patterns, characterization tests, incremental refactoring, redesigning untestable code, untangling dependencies, and carefully managed migrations rather than unnecessary rewrites. Turn the lessons learned into playbooks and reference implementations.
- Tooling: Find friction in the developer workflow and drive the creation of tools, automation, templates, analyzers, and AI-assisted agents and skills. These should speed up code comprehension, test generation, migration, refactoring, review, and release.
- Prototyping: Prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems, such as novel architectures, performance and scale limits, AI integration patterns, and modernization strategies. Prove feasibility, surface risks, and hand off clear designs and reference code to delivery teams or product groups.
- Design and build scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective services, APIs, orchestration layers, agent runtimes, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks. Balance new capabilities against performance, reliability, maintainability, cost, and backward compatibility.
- Diagnose and resolve complex cross-system issues involving concurrency, distributed state, dependencies, performance, data quality, and model behavior.
- Establish safe deployment, progressive exposure, rollback, recovery, monitoring, and end-to-end testing practices for critical production changes.
- Use telemetry, incident learnings, and quality indicators to measure and improve engineering effectiveness, including the velocity and quality impact of AI-assisted development.
To be successful in this role: In this pro-code engineering role, candidates have recent, substantial hands-on experience developing production software, demonstrated success working within and modernizing large, mature, or legacy codebases, and a track record of multiplying the pro-code effectiveness of others through mentoring, standards, and tooling. Experience limited primarily to low-code platforms, solution configuration, prompt engineering, or proof-of-concept development will not meet the core requirements of this role.
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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