Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Quick Facts

• Role: Principal Site Reliability Engineer
• Focus: Reliability strategy and operations for large-scale cloud/distributed services in regulated environments

Description

Lead reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices across Substrate workloads. Serve as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer, leading incident response for complex/high-impact events and driving durable systemic improvements through post-incident reviews. Architect automation, observability, and self-healing solutions while embedding reliability, security, and compliance into engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices in highly regulated environments
• Act as a senior on-call engineer (OCE) and lead incident response during Substrate service incidents
• Provide hands-on technical leadership during the most complex/high-impact incidents
• Conduct high-quality post-incident reviews and drive systemic engineering improvements across teams
• Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions
• Drive architectural decisions and define software engineering standards to make reliability, security, and compliance intrinsic
• Influence service design and engineering decisions across organizational boundaries
• Mentor senior and principal engineers and shape the long-term SRE technical direction
• Represent Substrate SRE perspectives with senior leadership and cross-functional partners

Requirements

• Doctorate in Computer Science/IT (or related) plus 2+ years technical experience in software engineering/network engineering/systems administration; OR Master’s plus 3+ years; OR Bachelor’s plus 5+ years; OR equivalent experience
• Ability to meet Microsoft and customer/government security screening requirements
• Active U.S. Government Secret security clearance
• U.S. citizenship verification required
• Pass Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years

Benefits

• Eligible for benefits and other compensation (details provided via Microsoft pay and benefits page)