Principal Software Engineer

The Azure Compute team serves as the core of Microsoft’s Cloud Operating System. It builds fault-tolerant distributed systems on commodity data center hardware to deliver infrastructure for hosting cloud applications in virtual servers. As a globally available foundational service, Azure Compute supports platforms at the scale of OpenAI, Bing, Azure Storage, and Structured Query Language (SQL). The team’s work creates the perception of limitless, elastic, and always-available resources.

Current projects offer opportunities to make a significant impact across several areas. These include improving cluster scale and density by managing larger service footprints, optimizing virtual machine density, reducing cluster fragmentation, and increasing compute core utilization. The team is also expanding Azure’s capabilities for containers, including Docker and Hyper-V Containers. These efforts involve building highly scalable and available microservices that will form the next generation of the Compute Fabric and provide service management for all Azure Compute services.

Additional initiatives focus on enhancing service uptime and reliability. This includes applying machine learning to create a more adaptive and intelligent kernel that responds to data center events to improve availability. The team also works on delivering extremely fast and reliable on-demand compute instances, aiming for performance improvements that are multiple orders of magnitude beyond current capabilities. Engineers collaborate across the stack to drive innovation and solve complex technical challenges with measurable results.

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.

• 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.
• 6+ years of experience in debugging.
• 5+ years of experience in architecting large systems.

Other Qualifications: 

• 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. 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science OR related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript OR Python
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

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 2, 2025.

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• 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.