Principal Software Engineer-AI Infrastructure

Overview

Team Purpose

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Engineering Systems team at Microsoft builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale.

You will help create foundational capabilities spanning service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management.

Working with AI researchers, product engineers, hardware teams, and technical leaders, you will help provide reliable and consistent paths from development to production within a multidisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive engineering team.

Role Summary

As a Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure in the AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team, you will provide technical leadership for deeply complex and ambiguous products and solutions across the organization.

You will own overall system architecture, align technical decisions with business outcomes, guide multiple key initiatives, and shape reusable platforms that support Microsoft's products and AI services at scale. You will establish engineering standards, mentor technical leaders, influence cross-functional teams and open-source communities, and drive secure, reliable, and maintainable solutions across product boundaries.

This opportunity will allow you to shape organization-wide infrastructure strategy, advance engineering standards across complex product areas, and expand your influence across Microsoft and the broader technology community.

Microsoft 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

• Oversee and own the architecture of deeply complex and ambiguous products and solutions, evaluate design options and trade-offs, and align technical decisions with customer, business, and long-term platform outcomes.
• Drive innovation and delivery across multiple large-scale initiatives, guiding teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization.
• Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code that can be reused across the organization while meeting performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, security, compliance, and cost requirements.
• Establish and champion company-wide coding, testing, architecture, and operational standards; provide technical leadership in reviews and mentor engineers and technical leaders.
• Act as a technical authority for cross-product debugging, verification, telemetry, incident learning, repair actions, and automation that targets zero-touch deployment and prevents recurrence.
• Build alignment across teams, customers, and technical leadership; negotiate dependencies and trade-offs, hold stakeholders accountable for commitments, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.
• Influence open-source projects and industry practices, evaluate emerging technologies, and advance layered security, privacy, safety, and strategic compliance across complex products.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 providing architecture and technical leadership for multiple large-scale distributed systems, databases, analytics systems, or platform product areas.
• Experience aligning technical decisions with business outcomes and influencing cross-functional teams and senior technical leadership.
• Experience developing systems with languages such as Java, C++, or Rust and applying concepts such as query execution, indexing, concurrency, distributed algorithms, or data structures.
• Experience influencing open-source projects or participating in open-source project management and governance.
• Experience building interactive services, analytics interfaces, data infrastructure, compute infrastructure, or other large-scale platform systems.

Other Qualifications

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check
• Microsoft Background Check

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