The Job

Principal Software Engineer

Technology, Data & Digital · Software & Web Development · Software Engineering · Data Engineering · Cloud Engineering

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In short

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the strategic development of its Experimentation and Configuration Service (ECS). This role involves driving complex architecture, influencing engineering practices, and transforming the platform with AI-native capabilities to ensure safe, scalable, and resilient configuration management for Microsoft services.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive the architecture, roadmap, and execution strategy for major ECS platform areas or cross-team initiatives.
  • Broker complex architecture decisions across multiple teams, including partners, PM, security, compliance, and service owners.
  • Lead the design and adoption of agentic-native engineering systems, AI coding agents, and AI-native engineering practices.
  • Translate ambiguous customer, business, security, reliability, and operational needs into clear technical bets and execution plans.
  • Define quality metrics, coding patterns, validation strategy, telemetry, observability, and operational readiness standards.
  • Resolve complex technical and product-system problems spanning distributed systems, scale, reliability, security, compliance, and cross-service dependencies.
  • Build trusted technical relationships with partner teams and use customer insights to improve ECS strategy and design.
  • Change momentum of existing plans to identify higher-impact directions and pivot teams toward better outcomes.
  • Mentor senior engineers and tech leads, build technical capability, and create an inclusive engineering environment.
  • Ensure platform investments are designed for production excellence, customer impact, cost awareness, reliability, security, and maintainability.

Requirements

  • 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.
  • Proven experience leading architecture and delivery of large-scale cloud services, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure across multiple teams.
  • Deep technical expertise in service architecture, reliability engineering, distributed systems, telemetry, security, scalability, and production operations.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives, create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, and influence senior technical stakeholders.
  • Solid coding and design judgment, with a track record of delivering simple, maintainable, high-quality technical solutions.
  • Experience adopting or leading AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, automation platforms, or intelligent engineering systems.
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including Microsoft Cloud Background Check.

Desired Qualifications

  • 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
  • Experience with configuration management, experimentation platforms, feature rollout systems, policy engines, SDKs, service control planes, or large-scale developer platforms.
  • Experience defining multi-year technical strategy, architecture direction, or engineering standards across product groups.
  • Experience with Copilot, AI agents, MCP, SKILLs, autonomous troubleshooting, self-healing systems, AI-native platform engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, evaluation platforms, or agentic software development frameworks.
  • Proven ability to drive reliability, compliance, security, and operational excellence for mission-critical services.
  • Solid ability to synthesize production data, customer feedback, and business priorities into actionable technical strategy.
  • Experience mentoring senior engineers, growing technical leaders, and shaping engineering culture.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially for executive-level technical narratives, design reviews, and cross-org decision making.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to shape a foundational Microsoft platform at the convergence of configuration management, AI-native engineering, service reliability, and agentic automation.
  • Work on deeply technical, high-impact problems with broad customer reach.
  • Influence cross-team strategy and help build an engineering system where agents and humans collaborate.
  • Contribute to an inclusive engineering environment where people can do their best work.
  • Microsoft's mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
#Software Engineering#Platform#Configuration Management#Distributed Systems#AI#Cloud
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Company

Microsoft

Job Posted

4 days ago

Employment Type

Full Time

WorkMode

Hybrid

Experience Level

Senior

Locations

United States

Qualification

Bachelor, Master

Applicants

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