Join the Azure AI Knowledge team as a Senior Software Engineer, contributing to a cutting-edge platform that powers both traditional search and generative AI experiences for enterprise data. This role is perfect for experienced engineers passionate about tackling complex challenges at the nexus of AI, information retrieval, distributed systems, and large-scale cloud services.

You will take ownership of critical technical domains, from initial architecture and implementation through deployment, reliability, and ensuring customer success. Collaborating across teams and organizational boundaries, you'll make informed engineering decisions in ambiguous environments and elevate the technical standards for the entire team.

Azure AI Search is a globally distributed, managed search service enabling developers to build secure, scalable AI applications. It supports diverse workloads and continuously enhances search relevance, developer experience, scale, availability, performance, and operational efficiency. This is a unique opportunity to shape foundational capabilities in Microsoft's key Data, Cloud, and AI areas, delivering significant and lasting customer impact globally.

Lead the design and implementation of complex, high-impact features for Azure AI Search. Take full ownership of significant technical areas, including architecture, development, testing, deployment, observability, reliability, security, and ongoing operations.

Make strategic architectural and engineering decisions for distributed cloud-scale systems, carefully balancing customer needs, performance, availability, cost, and long-term maintainability. Identify and address ambiguous, cross-cutting problems by developing clear technical strategies and driving execution across engineering and partner teams.

Build and maintain highly available production services, implementing robust telemetry, monitoring, incident response protocols, root-cause analysis, and durable corrective actions. Engage directly with customers and partners to understand their needs, translate requirements into effective technical solutions, and resolve complex issues.

Influence engineering priorities by leveraging service data, customer feedback, and operational insights. Mentor junior engineers, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and actively contribute to raising engineering standards within the team. Foster an inclusive engineering culture focused on collaboration, accountability, continuous learning, and customer impact.

A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, coupled with at least 7 years of professional software engineering experience, is required. Alternatively, equivalent practical experience will be considered.

Demonstrate strong design, coding, debugging, and problem-solving proficiencies in C#, C++, Java, or another object-oriented programming language. Proven experience in designing, building, shipping, and operating production-grade cloud services or large-scale distributed systems is essential.

Possess a deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, encompassing concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency, networking, storage, performance, and scalability. Experience owning intricate technical components from initial design through to production operations is critical.

Exhibit the ability to work autonomously, navigate ambiguous problem spaces effectively, and drive consensus across engineering teams. Strong written and verbal communication skills are necessary, particularly for articulating architectural decisions and trade-offs. Experience mentoring engineers and enhancing engineering practices via reviews and technical guidance is highly valued.

Familiarity with Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or related search technologies is expected. Preferred qualifications include experience with information retrieval, semantic search, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI, or knowledge retrieval systems. Experience operating services on Azure or similar large-scale cloud platforms is beneficial.