Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft Digital (MSD) builds and manages the critical products and services that Microsoft runs on. We boldly pursue big ideas that power transformational advances at Microsoft and for our customers, while helping Microsoft teams work smarter, faster, and more securely every day. Microsoft Digital employees have deep technical and business expertise, customer insights, and a clear point of view that comes from first-hand, large-scale experience with Microsoft and industry solutions. We are engineers, technology leaders and experts, digital transformation change agents, and customer advocates.

We have exciting opportunities for you to innovate, influence, transform, inspire, and grow within our organization and we encourage you to apply to learn more!

We're a growing team looking for a passionate Principal Software Engineer. In this role, you'll help define and build the next generation of our agentic platform, orchestrating the latest AI models and harnesses in service of company-wide developer productivity by building and architecting digital agent scenarios.

Our work spans the full lifecycle of agentic systems in production. We design and improve the core capabilities that shape agent behavior, including tool design, planning and execution loops, orchestration, evaluation, and safety guardrails. We build the AI fundamentals that make those systems dependable in practice, including observability, progressive delivery, and reliability engineering. And we build the user experience for our customers to use these agents from any device seamlessly.  

We are looking for an AI Software Engineer to help build this next generation of agentic systems. Engineers on our team operate with high autonomy in a highly agile environment: cycles, thin slices, feature flags, progressive delivery, and constant learning. We are looking for teammates with good owner’s mindset and a bias for action - engineers who take ownership of ambiguous problems, adopt modern science research, engineering patterns & practices, move quickly, learn from production, and continuously raise the quality bar as they ship.

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.

#MSD 

#MSDJOBS 

In this role, you will:

• Leverage modern AI-assisted development practices and tooling to accelerate delivery while maintaining high code quality.
• Use AI in your daily coding and advocate to the team and customers an evolving state-of-the-art of how to do this.
• Demonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work — because no one has tried them before.
• Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers in, and beyond, your team.
• Build AI‑powered product features using technologies such as large language models (LLMs), vector stores, and agentic workflows to improve security signal analysis and customer outcomes.
• Continuously improve engineering efficiency by leveraging AI tooling, automation, and documentation to streamline development and operational workflows.
• Own medium‑to‑large features end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production environments.
• Develop software using languages such as TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and others
• Design, develop, and maintain backend services and APIs that support agentic workflows and platform capabilities
• Collaborate closely with PM, Design, and partner teams to design and develop scalable solutions
• Lead by example, adhering to engineering practices, raising the quality bar, and improving the team's response to customer incidents 
• With minimal supervision, tests and explores various design options for a product/solution feature, outlining strengths and weaknesses of each option. 
• Uses appropriate AI tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in a disciplined manner. 
• Understands and applies security practices and establishes code invariants to model "security as code," ensuring each layer is independently secure, and minimizing risk with minimal supervision.
• Apply Security‑by‑Design and Responsible AI principles when building features that leverage AI to enhance threat detection and response capabilities.
• Contribute positively to team culture, demonstrating growth mindset, openness to feedback, and a collaborative approach in a fast‑paced, data‑driven environment.

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.
• Hands-on experience of building and operating LLM powered agentic systems in production, with direct ownership over quality, reliability, and iterations
• 6+ years of experience building production software using one or more modern programming languages such as AI LLM, agents, skills , C#, Java or Python.
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted software development tools and workflows (e.g. AI coding agents, LLM-powered development environments)
• Expertise in LLM and GenAI Application development.
• GitHub Copilot and Copilot Workspace — AI pair programming, CLI, and task-oriented development
• Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
• Prior experience building with Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks).
• Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Good product mindset with a track record of owning ambiguous problem spaces and driving them to high-quality outcomes
• Solid engineering fundamentals, including systems design, performance, and debugging in complex production environments
• Track record of designing, running, and optimizing evaluations for agentic systems, including tools, prompts, and agent loops
• Good understanding of Generative AI & software engineering fundamentals, data structures, and problem-solving.
• Ability to learn new technologies quickly and adapt to deliver customer and business impact.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+ years of experience in cloud services or AI systems. Experience building and shipping AI features for world-class production systems.
• Good communication skills and ability to collaborate within a multi-disciplinary team.
• Proven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.
• Proficient software engineering fundamentals: system design, algorithms, testing, debugging, and code review.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where practices are still being established.- Hands-on experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as:
• Experience dogfooding, evaluating, and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translating those insights into team-wide practices..
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs or GraphQL services.
• Track record of high development velocity through effective use of AI coding assistants and automation
• Experience with database technologies (SQL, NoSQL)

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.