Principal Software Engineer

Windows 365 Cloud PC (W365) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) have recently been recognized as leaders in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service (DaaS). At its core, W365 and AVD provide business customers a modern, elastic, cloud-based Windows experience. 

The Windows Cloud division is looking for a Principal Software Engineer who can help us take Azure Virtual Desktop as well as Windows 365 Cloud PC to a whole new level.

As a Principal Software Engineer on our team, you will help design and implement a new highly scalable communications and signaling system used in all AVD and W365 desktops, to ensure end-users can always connect to their Virtual Desktops.  Uptime, resiliency, and scale for this component are paramount.  You will extend your knowledge of cloud compute, hypervisors, desktop virtualization, storage at scale, and other technical areas. You will be part of a team designing new platform capabilities involving virtualized compute, storage, networking for our core products to enhance the value to our customer base.  You will also be a part of an agile team working with experienced engineers and product managers that behave more like a technology startup. 

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.

Required/Minimum 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 of experience as a software engineer designing, implementing, and shipping cloud services or software products.

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

• 4+ years of experience with distributed systems delivering large-scale, secure, and resilient cloud services.
• Experience as a technical lead with a passion for coaching and mentoring others. 
• Broad experience of working across teams to deliver shared solutions to complex problems. 
• Ability to quickly ramp up, understand complex problems, and create solutions across many products. 

#WCX

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios. 

• Leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of products/solutions (e.g. design, cost). Creates design documents and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed solutions. 

• Leads by example and mentors’ others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. 

• Leads efforts for creation and conducting of experimentation to determine the effectiveness of changes, monitors developments for prototyping and testing products, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. 

• Design and develop large scale distributed software services or Core OS and Virtualization components.     

• Adhere to and drive modern software engineering practices through design and code reviews.     

• System design through well-defined interfaces across multiple components, code reviews, leveraging data/telemetry to make decisions.     

• Develop “best-in-class” engineering for our services by ensuring that the services and the components are well-defined and modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored and reusable.     

• Improve test coverage for services, organize and implement integration tests, and resolve problem areas.     

• Consider testability, portability/monitoring, reliability, and maintainability, and understand when code is ready to be shared and delivered.    

• Gain a working understanding of Microsoft as a business and collaborate with mentors and leaders to contribute to cohesive, end-to-end experiences for our users. 
• Focus on customer/partner needs through a data driven approach.