Join Microsoft's AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team as a Principal Software Engineer to build the cloud platform and developer systems powering AI services at scale. You will contribute to foundational capabilities in service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management.

Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, hardware teams, and technical leaders to create reliable and consistent paths from development to production. This multidisciplinary and inclusive team offers an opportunity to shape organization-wide infrastructure strategy and advance engineering standards.

Microsoft is dedicated to empowering every person and organization to achieve more. We foster a growth mindset, drive innovation, and collaborate to realize shared goals, building on values of respect, integrity, and accountability in an inclusive culture.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for complex products and solutions, owning system architecture and aligning technical decisions with business objectives. Guide multiple key initiatives and shape reusable platforms supporting Microsoft's AI services.

Establish engineering standards, mentor technical leaders, and influence cross-functional teams and open-source communities. Drive secure, reliable, and maintainable solutions across product boundaries. You will also act as a technical authority for cross-product debugging, incident learning, and automation to prevent recurrence.

Build alignment across teams and stakeholders, negotiate dependencies and trade-offs, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure. Influence open-source projects, evaluate emerging technologies, and advance security, privacy, safety, and compliance across complex products.

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

Preferred qualifications include a Master's Degree in Computer Science and 12+ years of experience, or a Bachelor's Degree with 15+ years of experience. Experience in architecture and technical leadership for large-scale distributed systems, databases, analytics systems, or platform product areas is highly valued.

Demonstrated ability to align technical decisions with business outcomes and influence cross-functional teams and senior leadership is crucial. Experience developing systems with languages like Java, C++, or Rust, and applying concepts such as query execution, indexing, concurrency, distributed algorithms, or data structures is beneficial. Engagement with open-source projects or participation in their management and governance is also a plus.