Principal Software Engineer
12/21/2025
The Principal Software Engineer will partner with stakeholders to determine user requirements and provide technical leadership for product development. They will also mentor engineers and ensure the reliability and performance of the evaluation platform.
Salary
163000 - 296400 USD
Working Hours
40 hours/week
Company Size
10,001+ employees
Language
English
Visa Sponsorship
No
Shape the way the M365 measures AI!
On the Evaluation Platform Team, you’ll have a front-row seat to how AI impacts millions of users and help steer one of Microsoft’s most important efforts forward, taking our evaluation system to the next level by allowing our teams, partners and customers understand what "high quality" means for our AI products.
Our goal is to accelerate learning by making sure all the user journeys of an eval system (fine tuning a model, launching a new feature or experiment, adding metrics, onboarding a new 1P or 3P partner, etc) are supported by friendly, reliable, scalable and well documented tools that are loved by their users.
Some of the work you will be involved in:
- Building reusable components that we can leverage across our evaluation stack
- Driving new capabilities in the platform that reduce the time to launch by allowing more capacity, speeding up the system, reducing the number of manual steps to launch, improving debuggability, etc…
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.
Responsibilities
- Partner with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for our evaluation scenarios
- Provide technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
- Lead by example and mentor others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company.
- Leverage deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items.
- Hold 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 seek new knowledge and adapt 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 share knowledge with other engineers.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor'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.
- Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
- Experience building systems to evaluate and drive quality in a product and using data to drive engineering decisions.
- A passion for building reliable, scalable infrastructure and making your users successful.
- Comfortable at operating in a dynamic environment; takes initiative to bring clarity and momentum.
- Self-motivated and outcomes-focused, with a sense of ownership and accountability.
- Platform engineering mindset: building reusable components, reducing time‑to‑launch, improving debuggability, and delivering well‑documented tooling.
- 5+ years of experience owning and delivering large-scale projects involving multiple engineers.
- Experience with AI/ML technologies.
Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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.
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