Join Microsoft's AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team as a Principal Software Engineer. This role is pivotal in building and enhancing the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that power AI services at scale. You'll contribute to foundational capabilities in areas like service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, data pipelines, search, compute, and service lifecycle management. Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams to ensure reliable and consistent paths from development to production within a diverse and inclusive engineering environment.

This position offers a unique opportunity to shape long-term infrastructure strategy, deepen leadership in complex distributed systems, and strengthen engineering practices across teams and open-source communities. Microsoft is committed to empowering every person and organization to achieve more, fostering a culture of growth mindset, innovation, and collaboration.

Drive innovation and deliver software at scale, ensuring architecture, implementation, deployment, and production operations meet stringent reliability, security, performance, and cost requirements. Provide architectural guidance and mentorship, advancing engineering craftsmanship through best practices in coding, testing, design, observability, and operations. Design reusable platform-first products, services, and tools, considering operational impact and long-term maintainability. Serve as a technical lead for multiple key initiatives, identifying problems and opportunities, and guiding teams through the entire development lifecycle. Partner with stakeholders to align perspectives, resolve dependencies, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure. Influence relevant open-source projects, evaluate new technologies, and share knowledge. Lead improvements in debugging, incident learning, deployment automation, security hardening, and telemetry for complex infrastructure systems.

A Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, coupled with 6+ years of technical engineering experience is required. Proficiency in programming languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python is essential. Experience in providing architectural or technical leadership across multiple complex engineering initiatives is highly valued. Demonstrated experience in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or client-server architectures is expected. Familiarity with architecting data infrastructure, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), AI infrastructure, storage, graph, compute, or platform systems is preferred. Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in their management and governance is a plus. A Master's Degree with 8+ years of experience, or a Bachelor's Degree with 12+ years of experience in the specified areas, will also be considered.