Principal Software Engineer

Azure Front Door (AFD) is the global edge for Microsoft and many of our customers—accelerating and protecting internet-scale apps with ultra-low latency, high availability, and robust security.
The Dataplane team builds and operates high-performance edge services behind traffic termination, TLS/QUIC, HTTP/2–3, routing, caching, rate limiting, and L4/L7 DDoS protections that keep Microsoft and customer workloads safe and fast worldwide.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll architect low-latency proxies, advance HTTP/3, strengthen L4/L7 DDoS defenses, and lead reliability at global scale. You’ll set technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner across Azure to deliver secure, fast, and resilient internet-facing experiences.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive.

Sydney preferred location 

• Architect and build internet-scale, low-latency edge services (proxies, load balancers, TLS offload, routing pipelines, caching layers) across hundreds of global sites and thousands of nodes.
• Design and build services that provide L4/L7 DDoS protection, HTTP-level CDN, global load balancing, and WAF capabilities.
• Lead reliability by design: champion SLOs, error budgets, and graceful degradation patterns; instrument systems end-to-end (metrics/traces/logs), drive telemetry-driven engineering and automated mitigations.
• Lead identification of dependencies and development of design documents for products, applications, services, or platforms.
• Mentor engineers and lead by example to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Own live-site for AFD services: participate in DRI/on-call, guide incident response, lead post-incident reviews, and convert findings into systemic fixes and automation.
• Proactively seek new knowledge and adapt to trends, technical solutions, and patterns that improve availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance at scale.

Required

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical discipline AND 10+ years building and operating distributed systems or networking platforms in production; track record of delivering high‑throughput, low‑latency services.
• Strong systems programming proficiency in C/C++ and/or Rust (Go acceptable) with deep understanding of memory, concurrency, async I/O, and performance profiling (perf/eBPF/flamegraphs).
• Expertise in networking & protocols: TCP/UDP, DNS, TLS, HTTP/1.1–3, QUIC; load balancing algorithms; congestion control; connection pooling; keep‑alive; retry/backoff.
•  Linux fundamentals (kernel & networking stack), containerization/orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD, safe releases, and observability (metrics/traces/logs).
• Proven live‑site leadership: incident command, debugging in production, mitigation design, and preventative engineering at scale.
• Experience building services on cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS.

Preferred

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
  • OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in the above languages.
• CDN/edge proxy experience (e.g., NGINX/Envoy/ATS) or custom proxy pipelines.
• DDoS mitigation (L3/4 and L7), rate limiting, abuse detection, traffic shaping, and resiliency patterns (hedged requests, circuit breakers).
•  At‑scale telemetry systems (e.g., Kusto/Geneva), capacity planning, and performance/COGS optimization.
• Cryptography/TLS internals, certificate lifecycle, HSM/KMS integrations.
• Experience with Azure networking/compute primitives and large multi‑tenant services.

Other Requirements

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including:
  • Microsoft Cloud Background Check: Required upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

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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.