Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and deliver trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate, high-energy engineers to help achieve that mission. 

The Azure Firmware/Software Center of Excellence is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to be a key leader in leveraging cutting edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve efficiency as we develop and light up innovative hardware solutions that power Azure. From driving integration of the latest AI developer tools to building new AI applications to streamline fleet management and quality improvement, this role is about innovation at scale as we strive to make our world-class infrastructure even better. 

This hands-on role will provide technical leadership across the organization and on a growing team tasked with accelerating our productivity and processes so that every developer can achieve more. To be successful in this role you must have a great track record of delivering quality results to customers, an engineering mindset, an innate aptitude for agility, and technical excellence in software engineering. 

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

• Drive education and adoption of the latest AI developer tools across the organization. Establish and iterate on best known methods tailored to the team’s development goals and unique environments.  

• Stay up to date on cutting edge developments across the fast-moving AI landscape. Distill and propagate the latest advances throughout the team. 

• Provide overarching technical leadership and direction to a team focused on driving adoption of and innovation through the latest AI capabilities. 

• Partner with stakeholders across the team to identify opportunities to build new AI-based solutions to improve engineering efficiency across development, validation, monitoring, and live support. 

• Lead and support the development of new solutions hands-on through architecture, implementation, and deployment. 

• Lead and drive highly complex and mission critical solutions that involve multiple Azure Services. 

• Design, develop and operate large scale, low latency, and high throughput cloud services.  

• Determine the technique needed and develops analytic models to understand complex business issues and provide data-driven insights by integrating statistical inference, Machine Learning modeling, AI and/or other advanced analytical methods to manage, classify and analyze complex data from a variety of sources. 

• Perform data analysis using a variety of analytical tools (Python, KQL, MLStudio, Synapse, Power BI, Fabric etc), and interprets results with actionable recommendations. 

• Take an active role and partner with internal peer teams and external partners to ensure highly available, fully secure, accurate and actionable results based on fleet signals, policies, and predictive analytics. 

Other:

• Embody our culture and values 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering 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 of hands-on experience on leading architecture for large scale systems, designing and coding on mission critical scalable distributed systems and running live sites.   
• Hands-on experience using latest AI development tools to drive engineering efficiency.  

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or preferred qualifications:

• 5+ years’ experience of shipping cloud services and having been through at least one development cycle.  
• 3+ years of industry experience with common ML engineering
• Solid data engineering and ML experience with large language models. 
• programming languages and platforms, such as Python, ML Stack, Synapse. 
• High tolerance to ambiguity and ability make progress when situations are in flux.   
• Experience with low-level firmware development. Familiarity and understanding of hardware and devices. 
• Familiar with e2e machine learning development cycle, from model measurements / training/ evaluation to optimization/deployment, etc. 
• Experience in developing or modifying deep learning algorithms/architectures to improve computational and memory efficiency. 
• Experience working with large language models / multi-billion parameter models, focusing on their efficient training and online inference 
• Experiences in one of these training frameworks: Pytorch, Tensorflow, etc., and LLM is a plus. 
• Experience in big data mining, familiar with Hadoop/Spark is a plus. 
• Experience working in collaborative teams and cross-group efforts. 
• Proven ability to plan, schedule and deliver high quality software.  

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 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 and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

  #SCHIE