Senior Software Engineer, Fauna
Microsoft 365 and Copilot run on Substrate & Work IQ (SWIQ)—the trusted data and intelligence platform powering service health, operational excellence, business insights, and AI-driven decision making across Microsoft's largest cloud services. As Microsoft 365 and Copilot continue to grow at unprecedented scale, SWIQ provides the foundational intelligence that connects product experiences, infrastructure, operations, and business outcomes, enabling teams to build, operate, and innovate with confidence.
The SWIQ Performance Team is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to define and drive the technical strategy for Copilot and Microsoft 365 Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) intelligence. You will build the trusted platform that connects product usage, service dependencies, infrastructure consumption, operational telemetry, and Finance-aligned cost models into a unified and scalable economics foundation. This platform powers critical business decisions across engineering, capacity planning, product strategy, and finance, helping Microsoft optimize investments while accelerating innovation.
As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the design of durable architectures that transform complex cross-organizational challenges into trusted platforms, reusable intelligence, and measurable business impact. You will work across rapidly evolving Copilot experiences—including agents, enterprise productivity, collaboration, and emerging AI workloads—to make the relationships between cost, quality, reliability, efficiency, and customer value transparent and actionable.
A key expectation of this role is to drive AI-native transformation. You will reimagine how economics systems are built and operated by leveraging agents, intelligent automation, and machine reasoning to discover cost drivers, identify attribution gaps, evaluate optimization opportunities, recommend actions, learn from outcomes, and continuously improve decision quality. Your work will help shift operational and business decision making from manual analysis toward intelligent, autonomous systems that scale with the future of Microsoft 365 and Copilot.
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.
Shape the future of COGS intelligence platforms, defining the technical vision that enables Microsoft 365 and Copilot teams to understand, optimize, and continuously improve cost, efficiency, reliability, and customer value at global scale.
Build trusted systems of intelligence that unify operational telemetry, product signals, infrastructure usage, and financial models into a single source of truth for engineering and business decisions.
Drive the shift from human-driven operations to autonomous operations by leveraging agents and AI-powered workflows to analyze signals, identify opportunities, recommend actions, and accelerate execution.
Lead cross-organizational initiatives, transforming complex and ambiguous problems into strategic investments and measurable outcomes.
Influence architecture and engineering direction, partnering with senior leaders to align technical strategy with business priorities and long-term platform goals.
Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and innovation, mentoring engineers, scaling best practices, and advancing AI-native engineering methodologies across SWIQ.
Other Requirements:
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:
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.
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Microsoft builds Windows, Azure, Office and the Copilot family of AI assistants, and operates one of the largest AI training and inference fleets in the world. Microsoft Research and the AI platform teams work across foundation models, systems for large-scale training, and applied ML in every product line.
Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, the company is also OpenAI's principal compute partner and ships AI tooling for developers through GitHub, VS Code and Azure AI.
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