Join Microsoft's AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team to build and enhance the cloud platform powering AI services at scale. This role offers the chance to shape foundational capabilities in areas like service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, and more. Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, and technical leaders in a multidisciplinary, inclusive environment to ensure reliable and consistent paths from development to production.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for complex, ambiguous products and solutions. You will own system architecture, align technical decisions with business goals, guide key initiatives, and develop reusable platforms that support Microsoft's AI services. Your influence will extend to establishing engineering standards, mentoring technical leaders, and driving secure, reliable, and maintainable solutions across product boundaries. This is an opportunity to significantly impact organization-wide infrastructure strategy and advance engineering standards across the broader technology community.

Oversee and own the architecture for complex products and solutions, critically evaluating design options and their trade-offs to align technical decisions with customer needs and long-term platform vision.

Drive innovation and successful delivery across multiple large-scale initiatives, providing architectural guidance from design through to operationalization.

Design and develop platform-first products, services, and tools that are extensible and reusable across the organization, while ensuring high standards for performance, scalability, resiliency, security, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.

Establish and champion company-wide coding, testing, architecture, and operational standards. Provide technical leadership through reviews and mentor engineers and technical leaders.

Serve as a technical authority for cross-product debugging, verification, telemetry, incident analysis, and repair actions, focusing on zero-touch deployment and prevention of recurrence.

Build consensus across teams, customers, and technical leadership, effectively negotiating dependencies and trade-offs to execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.

Influence open-source projects and industry best practices, evaluate emerging technologies, and advance layered security, privacy, safety, and strategic compliance across complex products.

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

Preferred qualifications include a Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related field with 12+ years of experience, or a Bachelor's Degree with 15+ years of experience. Experience in providing architecture and technical leadership for large-scale distributed systems, databases, analytics systems, or platform product areas is highly valued. Demonstrating experience in aligning technical decisions with business outcomes and influencing cross-functional teams and senior technical leadership is crucial. Familiarity with languages like Java, C++, or Rust, and applying concepts such as query execution, indexing, concurrency, distributed algorithms, or data structures is beneficial. Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in their management and governance, as well as building interactive services, analytics interfaces, data infrastructure, compute infrastructure, or other large-scale platform systems, are significant advantages.