Principal Software Engineer

Team Purpose 

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Engineering Systems team at Microsoft builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale. You will help create foundational capabilities spanning service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management. Working with AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams, you will help provide reliable and consistent paths from development to production within a multidisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive engineering team. 

Role Summary 

As a Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure in the AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team, you will serve as a technical leader for multiple key initiatives that build and improve large-scale infrastructure platforms. You will align perspectives across teams, make architectural trade-offs, and guide the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of reusable systems that support business and technology objectives. You will mentor engineers, advance engineering practices, partner with internal and external stakeholders, and influence open-source technologies that contribute to Microsoft's AI infrastructure. 

This opportunity will allow you to shape long-term infrastructure strategy, deepen your leadership across complex distributed systems, and strengthen engineering practices across teams and open-source communities. 

Microsoft Culture Statement 

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. 

Responsibilities 

• Drive innovation and deliver software at scale while ensuring architecture, implementation, deployment, and production operations meet reliability, security, compliance, performance, and cost requirements. 

• Provide architectural guidance and mentorship across teams, and advance engineering craftsmanship through coding, testing, design, observability, and operational best practices. 

• Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code that can be reused by other teams while accounting for operational impact and long-term maintainability. 

• Serve as technical lead for multiple key initiatives, identify problems and opportunities, and guide teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization. 

• Partner with teams, customers, and technical leadership to align perspectives, resolve dependencies and trade-offs, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure. 

• Participate in and influence relevant open-source projects, evaluate new technologies, and share knowledge and practices with broader engineering communities. 

• Lead debugging, incident-learning, deployment automation, security hardening, and telemetry improvements that increase quality and reliability across complex infrastructure systems.