Principal Software Engineer

Quick Facts

• Role: Principal Software Engineer (Software Engineering IC5)
• Focus: Azure Specialized platform services, architecture, reliability, diagnostics, and operational excellence

Description

You will shape the long-term architectural direction for Azure Specialized cloud offerings and lead design reviews across organizations. The role involves driving highly available distributed services and partnering with multiple engineering and operations teams to modernize platforms, improve observability and security, and accelerate root-cause analysis using telemetry, analytics, and AI-assisted techniques. You will also establish reliability frameworks (service health, SLIs/SLOs, and governance) and mentor engineers to raise engineering excellence and productivity.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term architectural direction and influence technical strategy across organizations
• Lead engineering excellence and operational rigor as a trusted technical advisor
• Design and evolve highly available distributed cloud services (scalability, resiliency, observability, security, operational efficiency)
• Simplify and modernize platform architectures; create reusable platform patterns; resolve complex cross-system issues
• Drive strategy for diagnostics and troubleshooting platforms using telemetry, analytics, and AI-assisted engineering
• Improve supportability and issue resolution through data-driven operational insights
• Lead reliability improvements with service health frameworks, service level objectives, operational metrics, and governance models
• Mentor engineers and strengthen technical leadership, productivity, and continuous improvement

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding
• Coding experience in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and/or Python
• Ability to meet required security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check on hire/transfer and every two years
• Preferred: Master’s degree with 8+ years experience, or Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years experience (or equivalent)
• 5+ years of experience in networking and compute

Benefits

This position may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; pay range varies by location. Certain roles require eligibility to meet security screening requirements.