Senior Software Engineer

Join the Azure AI Search Team

#COREAI #AZSEARCH #ENGGJOBS

"Azure AI Search is looking for a Senior Engineer to join our dynamic and innovative team. We seek an individual who is passionate about building large-scale, developer-facing cloud services. In this role, you will tackle complex problems at the intersection of Search, AI, distributed systems, and information retrieval being part of the backend engine team, all within an agile and customer-obsessed environment. "

Azure AI Search is a comprehensive, global managed search solution that serves as the hosted search engine on Azure. It providesdevelopers with an easy and efficient way to integrate powerful search capabilities into their applications, whether they are building e-commerce sites, data catalogs, or large enterprise systems.

One of our key missions is to enable super scalable and reliable search capabilities that empower AI agents to efficiently access and process information. By delivering robust solutions tailored for AI-driven scenarios, we ensure that intelligent applications can leverage search at massive scale with consistent performance and dependability.

In recent years, Azure AI Search has experienced significant growth, expanding into new market segments and supporting a broader range of customer scenarios. Positioned at the center of the AI wave, the service is enabling generative AI and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios, which are driving future growth. The team is actively working to support a wider variety of customer workloads, accommodating increasing data and query volume, diverse usage patterns, and multiple hosting modes.

Azure AI Search is also committed to improving key drivers of customer satisfaction, such as search relevance and developer experience. Investments in these areas are ongoing, ensuring that developers and customers receive a high-quality product that meets their evolving needs.

This position offers an exciting opportunity for individuals seeking to advance their careers and contribute to Microsoft's primary focus areas: Data, Cloud, and AI. The Azure AI Search team takes pride in both the products they build and the methods they use. Operating with a lean approach, the team is dedicated to customer obsession and employs evidence-based decision making. Weekly customer engagements ensure that the team is aligned with real-world needs and priorities.

The team leverages open-source technologies and develops in C#, Java, and C++. With a codebase that builds in minutes and a commitment to shipping new updates regularly, engineers spend most of their time writing code and driving improvements across various aspects of the service, including core search functionality, manageability, scalability, availability, performance, and developer experience.

Engineers on the team are expected to be self-driven, willing to tackle new challenges, take ownership, and learn quickly. Processes are kept to a minimum, enabling team members to focus on impactful work.

For more insight into the team culture, you can read about it in this news article: https://aka.ms/azure-search-startup. Explore the product further on the Azure AI Search product page here and see how developers use search here.

Required Qualifications

• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting, and communication skills.

• Solid understanding of systems fundamentals in operating systems, cloud platforms, or distributed systems.

• Openness to feedback and ability to collaborate effectively with diverse groups.

• Demonstrated independence, bias for action, and comfort with ambiguity.

• At least 8 years of engineering experience.

• Proficiency in C#, C++, Java, or other object-oriented programming languages; knowledge of SQL dialects and PowerShell or automation experience is advantageous.

• Experience building and shipping production-grade cloud services, including designing and implementing telemetry and monitoring solutions.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Lucene, Elasticsearch, Open Search, and the full ELK stack is beneficial.

• Background in building systems on large cloud platforms is a plus.

• Experience coordinating resources across diverse teams to restore service and maintain SLAs.

• Ability to conceptualize distributed services, understand their dependencies, and troubleshoot across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage, and distributed service layers.

• High enthusiasm, integrity, creativity, results-orientation, self-motivation, and resourcefulness in a fast-paced environment.

• Desire to work collaboratively, find win/win solutions, and celebrate team successes.

• Consistently display deep passion and empathy for customers and co-workers.

• Comfortable dealing with unknowns and ambiguity, able to sharpen fuzzy or unclear situations into actionable focus.

• Demonstrated ownership of and expertise in a medium-to-large problem area.

• Quickly grasps the basics in related technical areas.

• Strong fundamental skills, including debugging and system design.

• Emerging leadership skills—both technical and organizational—within project and engineering teams.

• Proposes solutions to challenging problems and drives them to completion.

• Familiarity with both the processes (how work gets done) and the customers (why the work matters), with an understanding of the broader business context.

• Must be able to independently design system-level features.

• Security first approach: Ability to design secure by design solutions, identify and improve security posture

• Logistics: Applying a systematic approach, being productive and efficient, quickly picking up new skills, managing time and priorities well, and conducting honest assessments and post-mortems.

• Influence: Expressing and sharing opinions across technical and process dimensions, influencing the roadmap and planning across multiple versions, and interacting effectively with team.

• Data Skills: Proficiency in drilling down through data and familiarity with techniques such as slice-and-dice, linear regression, and classification.

• Given a set of bugs, decides which to fix and how, articulates the rationale, convinces the group to approve the plan, and follows up to prevent similar issues in the future.

• Identifies a scenario or problem, then designs and implements a feature end-to-end while working collaboratively with others

#AZSEARCH #AIKNOWLEDGE #AZSIDC

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver new product capabilities to enable new Search workloads in Azure.

• Ensure product and service quality through hands-on DevOps involvement and the development of live site tooling.

• Engage with customers to better understand scenarios and resolve issues.

• Develop expertise in Azure provisioning and service management.