Does pioneering new and innovative ways to reimagine and transform end-user productivity across the breadth and depth of Microsoft’s global workforce sound exciting to you? Are you passionate about building the frontier firm and shaping the blueprint of an AI-first organization, driving innovation and showcasing an employee experience blueprint that inspires customers and partners to navigate their digital transformation? If so, Microsoft Digital (MSD) is an excellent place for you to grow your career.
Microsoft Digital (MSD)’s mission is to power, protect, and transform the employee experience at Microsoft around the world. We are driving AI transformation for the company, leveraging the latest technologies to empower Microsoft employees with the tools and services that define both the physical and digital future of work. Come build community, explore your passions, do your best work and be a part of the team within Microsoft Digital (MSD), the team that innovates, creates, and delivers the vision for Microsoft’s employee experience, corporate and legal affairs, global real estate products, and runs Microsoft’s internal network and infrastructure, plus builds campus modernization and hybrid solutions.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and development of the core network management and operations architecture for one of the largest enterprise networks in the world. Leveraging existing and industry-leading systems and agentic AI, this role is at the forefront of reimagining how to infuse AI-driven acceleration into every layer of the technology stack and business processes, driving transformative change across the organization. You will architect and deliver a seamless framework that empowers frontier firm execution for networking solutions, supporting employees, engineers, program managers, and sourcing engineers at a truly global scale. Your work will be instrumental in ensuring 99.99% availability, reliability, and performance for mission-critical systems. Join us to shape the future of enterprise networking and set new standards for innovation and operational excellence.
This position is located at the Redmond campus, with 3 days per week work in the office and 2 days per week work from home. Relocation assistance is available.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
Responsibilities
- Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
- Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
- Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
- Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
- Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
- Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.
- Defines system-level architecture and works across stakeholders to drive alignment and adoption.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
- 5+ years experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale infrastructure and network management systems, with hands-on expertise in leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Network as Code (NaC) principles to automate, orchestrate and optimize network operations at enterprise scale.
- Experienced designing resilient, secure, and highly available network architectures, and implementing automated deployment and configuration management pipelines using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Azure Resource Manager, AWS CloudFormation, etc.
- Experienced building AI-driven agentic solutions from conception to scale, including work with the latest AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs), generative AI, multi-agent orchestration, MCP and platforms like Azure AI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.
- Experienced with AI concepts, architecture, and acting as a change agent driving adoption of new technologies and practices across teams.
- Experienced driving operational excellence through AI agentic and code-driven approaches to monitoring, observability, and incident response.
- Experienced delivering solutions to support mission-critical workloads, ensuring compliance, scalability, and reliability in complex, multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
Other Requirements
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred Qualifications
- Ability to innovate at a platform level and drive integrated, end-to-end solutions through the shipping process.
- Skilled at cross divisional relationship building and ability to collaborate with partners; able to pull together technology and expertise across M365, Windows, and Azure to drive clarity across teams, agree on dependencies and common goals, and establish long-lasting, trusted relationships with partner teams.
- Ability to drive for results and influence for impact; able to drive clarity, communicate goals to key stakeholders, and motivate them to execute on time and at a high quality.
- Proven ability to shape our long-term strategy and technology choices across the full technology and services stack. Thought leader with a proven track record of bringing structure to ambiguous business problems and using data, logic, and practical experience to decompose them into straightforward, scalable solutions.
- Problem-solving ranging from conceptualization to implementation. Ability to communicate ideas effectively with executives and engineering teams. Must be able to plan work, and work to a plan adapting as necessary in a rapidly evolving environment. Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 10, 2025.
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Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
