Embark on a pivotal role shaping the future of Microsoft Copilot extensibility platforms. This position focuses on building next-generation capabilities, including Agents, MCP Servers, Actions, Connectors, Skills, Declarative Agents, and Digital Workers, to empower customers, partners, and enterprises.

Our mission is to deliver a secure, scalable, and enterprise-grade platform that enables intelligent agents to discover capabilities, interact with business systems, orchestrate workflows, and collaborate effectively, ultimately impacting millions of users globally.

As a Principal Group Architect, you will be instrumental in defining the long-term technical vision and architecture for Microsoft's Copilot Extensibility and Agent Platform investments. This high-impact role requires deep technical expertise, strategic foresight, and the ability to drive transformational change across large organizations. You will collaborate across multiple engineering teams to shape platform strategy, ensure architectural alignment, tackle complex technical challenges, and influence the development of next-generation enterprise AI systems.

Define and execute the multi-year technical vision, architecture strategy, and platform roadmap for Copilot Extensibility and Agent Platform capabilities. Lead the architecture for intelligent agent ecosystems, encompassing agent orchestration, tool invocation, workflow automation, agent collaboration, extensibility frameworks, and developer platforms. Design highly scalable, reliable, secure, and globally distributed cloud services essential for enterprise AI and agent-driven experiences. Drive technical direction across diverse engineering organizations, establishing architectural standards, platform principles, and robust engineering best practices. Collaborate closely with Product Management, Applied Science, Security, Research, and Engineering leaders to align platform strategy with crucial customer and business needs. Spearhead the resolution of highly ambiguous and business-critical technical challenges spanning distributed systems, AI platforms, developer ecosystems, and enterprise integrations. Identify key platform opportunities and develop reusable frameworks, SDKs, APIs, and services to accelerate innovation across numerous product teams. Champion operational excellence through strategic investments in reliability, observability, scalability, security, compliance, and service resilience. Represent architectural and technical strategies in executive reviews, architecture boards, strategic planning discussions, and critical cross-company initiatives. Mentor Principal Engineers, Architects, and senior technical leaders, actively contributing to the development of future technical talent.

A Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, coupled with 8+ years of technical engineering experience involving coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python is required.

Alternatively, equivalent experience will be considered.

Preferred qualifications include over 15 years of software engineering experience in designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, or platform technologies. Demonstrated success in defining architecture and technical strategy across multiple teams or organizations is highly valued.

Expertise in distributed systems, software architecture, cloud-native services, microservices, APIs, platform engineering, and service reliability is essential. Strong experience with enterprise-scale cloud platforms, scalability patterns, resilience engineering, observability, and operational excellence is expected.

Proven ability to lead large cross-organizational technical initiatives and influence senior engineering and business leaders is a key requirement. A solid understanding of security, privacy, compliance, identity, authentication, and platform governance principles is necessary.

Exceptional communication, technical leadership, and stakeholder management skills are vital. The ability to lead through influence and drive alignment within complex technical organizations is crucial.

Experience building AI platforms, Generative AI solutions, agentic systems, Copilot experiences, or intelligent automation platforms is advantageous. Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agent orchestration frameworks, multi-agent systems, and AI reasoning workflows is highly preferred.

Experience designing developer ecosystems, including extensibility platforms, SDKs, plugin architectures, APIs, or marketplace-based platforms, is beneficial. Experience with MCP, agent interoperability frameworks, enterprise integrations, workflow orchestration, or business process automation is also preferred.

A strong understanding of AI governance, evaluation systems, safety frameworks, and responsible AI practices is important. Experience operating mission-critical cloud services at a global scale, meeting demanding availability, reliability, and performance requirements, is valuable.

Recognition of technical leadership through patents, publications, open-source contributions, conference presentations, or significant industry impact is highly desirable.

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements is mandatory. This includes passing the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.