Principal Software Engineer
Summary
Principal Software Engineer on Microsoft's Azure Reliability team applying SRE practices to planet-scale distributed systems, embedding AI-powered automation to improve availability, observability, and operability of critical Azure services. Partners across product groups on architecture, incident response, and reusable platform improvements.
Overview
Responsibilities
Qualifications
Are you a customer-obsessed, AI-curious problem-solver who thrives in an inclusive, collaborative global team? Join Engineering Operations (EngOps) – the organization driving operational excellence across the Microsoft Cloud to strengthen quality, reliability, security, and customer trust. As part of EngOps, you’ll design solutions that prevent issues before they happen, embed AI-powered automation, and turn signals into actions that deliver measurable customer impact. Our culture of empowerment, inclusion, and growth mindset defines how we work.
We are the Azure Reliability team; a multidisciplinary engineering organization committed to making Azure the world’s safest and most reliable cloud. For Azure’s most critical services and products, we apply a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach. Our software engineers work closely with product teams to enhance availability, reliability, observability, and operability across our planet-scale systems.
We prioritize long-term platform improvements through engineering over repetitive manual tasks. Increasingly, we leverage AI to amplify our ability to scale reliability across Azure. Our teams contribute to product architecture, share knowledge and code, and focus on building reusable solutions that benefit multiple teams and services.
As the SRE discipline evolves, we continuously learn from industry peers and contribute to its advancement by innovating within our group and sharing our insights publicly. Our team brings diverse professional backgrounds, both traditional and non-traditional, and we’re committed to growing diversity. We believe that an inclusive environment where everyone feels safe to contribute leads to better teams, better products, and a better workplace. We’re not looking for people who know it all; we’re looking for those eager to learn it all. If you thrive on collaboration, embrace challenges, and see mistakes as opportunities to grow, we’d love to meet you.
Every day, customers stake their business and reputation on our cloud. You can help #EngOps keep them secure, resilient, and ready.
This role will require a minimum of three days in office.
Company Culture Statement
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 across multiple product groups to apply subject-matter expertise in distributed systems design practices, interactions between cloud technology layers and components, basic dependencies at scale, and the code that defines infrastructures.
- Lead by example and mentors' others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
- Develop and evangelize insights and standards that can be applied to improve system, platform, and/or product development and operations across the business.
- Drive continuous improvements in the architecture, code, features, operations and comprehensive use scenarios of products by leveraging end-to-end technical expertise.
- Make improvements to the product fundamentals and architecture, share knowledge and code, always looking for ways to make what we build useful to multiple teams and products.
- Demonstrates end-to-end expertise in distributed systems design, interactions between cloud technology layers.
- Provide technical leadership in test maturity reviews, static analysis reviews, meetings, on-call rotations, and incident responses throughout product development and operations cycles.
- Provides deep business and technical expertise as required to resolve major incidents.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline 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.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 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 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.Experience working with large-scale distributed systems (e.g., cloud computing providers, SaaS services, etc., ideally with millions or billions of users) or similarly complex environments.
- Awareness of, and ability to reason about, modern distributed software design patterns and cloud systems architecture, including microservices, containers, load-balancing, queuing, caching.
- Experience with C#/Java/C/C++/Golang.
- Experience in building, shipping and operating reliable solutions.
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.