Principal Software Engineer, Core AI

Quick Facts

• Role: Principal Software Engineer (Core AI)

• Focus: Cloud-scale systems for AI usage consumption, telemetry, and distributed billing/reconciliation

Description

You will help build cloud services that make AI consumption accurate, explainable, and dependable for customers and partner teams. The role involves designing and implementing distributed usage and billing systems connecting model onboarding, metering, processing, and reconciliation. You will provide hands-on technical leadership across design, coding, testing, deployment, and operations.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, reliable, and secure cloud services; set technical direction for resilient architecture and maintainable software

• Translate customer and business needs into technical architecture and delivered solutions

• Collaborate with engineering, product, and partner teams to clarify requirements and align interfaces/dependencies

• Own the end-to-end service lifecycle and continuously improve service quality and health

• Lead through production code, design/code reviews, and mentoring to strengthen engineering judgment and delivery

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field

• 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python (or equivalent)

• At least 8 years software-development experience using one or more programming languages (or equivalent experience)

• Experience designing, building, and operating cloud services, distributed backend services, or data-processing systems in production

• Strong coding and system-design skills: API and data-model design, automated testing, debugging, and maintainable production code

• Demonstrated ability to improve reliability via testing, telemetry, incident diagnosis, and lasting engineering fixes

• Hands-on technical ownership from design through production; lead across teams, communicate trade-offs, and deliver through collaboration

Benefits

• Flexible work options (remote or in-office) discussed based on role and location

• Eligible for benefits and other compensation (per Microsoft’s published pay/benefits information)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with billing, usage metering, or reconciliation

• Familiarity with AI model usage, token-based measurement, event-driven architectures, and cloud-scale telemetry/analytics

• Experience with resilient processing patterns, replay/recovery, schema evolution, and automated end-to-end validation across deployment regions

• Record of mentoring engineers and improving engineering quality through practical technical leadership