Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation (CO+I) team builds and operates Microsoft datacenters, which in turn power Microsoft’s cloud business. We anticipate and provide capacity for continuous scale. The CO+I Engineering team (CO+IE) delivers services, applications, and automation supporting datacenter planning, construction, and operation. We own a large portfolio of services, including workflows that enable predicable, lowest cost datacenter construction, telemetry systems that drive high availability and optimized energy usage, and task and performance management applications that help our operation run as efficiently as possible. CO+I Engineering is a competitive advantage for Microsoft, and an important pillar in its cloud success.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who can deliver automation capabilities that power the planning and execution efforts, drive workflow improvements and build solutions to assist in the delivery of large-scale data centers through efficient management of cost and schedule.

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.

• Own critical services and components end-to-end. Lead design and implementation of scalable, secure, and reliable systems, make architecture decisions, define service boundaries.
• Author design documents, present tradeoffs and decisions to leadership, and provide status/health signals with clarity and accountability
• Lead technical strategy and roadmaps. Translate business objectives into engineering plans, set technical direction for a product area, decompose ambiguous problems into executable work, and drive multi‑release roadmaps with measurable outcomes.
• Establish and champion best practices for code quality, testing, observability, performance, availability, and operational excellence (including (Designated Responsible Individual) DRI/on‑call ownership, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, and post‑mortems)
• Design for resiliency and cost efficiency, leverage Azure and Microsoft services where appropriate; instrument services with telemetry to drive data‑informed iteration
• Write high quality, maintainable, reusable code following SOLID principles.
• Unblock others, perform deep design and code reviews, coach senior engineers, and multiply team impact through reusable frameworks, patterns, and libraries.
• Partner with PM, Design, Data/Applied Science, and other engineering teams, manage dependencies, influence stakeholders to converge on pragmatic, high‑impact solutions.
• Build automated test strategies (unit, integration, end‑to‑end), CI/CD pipelines, and safe deployment practices; use canarying/feature flags to de‑risk releases.
• Identify opportunities to integrate Copilot/agentic workflows or platform primitives to improve user and developer experiences.   
• Share learnings and code assets developed with the CO+I engineering team.

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. 

Background Check 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience. 
• 4+ years of experience in architectural leadership, driving reliability, telemetry, and operational workflows through safe deployment practices.
• Experience working through the full product cycle from initial design to rapid production deployment.
• Experience working across multiple teams and disciplines and ability to influence without authority.
• Ability to lead highly complex initiatives across multiple organizations.
• Experience architecting and delivering distributed cloud services (Azure preferred).
• Experience creating and shipping V1 products using modern development practices.
• Experience using agile methodologies and/or test-driven development (TDD).
• Experience with shipping software products across multiple platforms/devices
• Analytical, problem-solving, testing and debugging skills.

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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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.