Senior Software Engineer - Gaming

Come help build the next evolution in Xbox Game Compatibility. Join the Xbox Platform team and leverage your system engineering experience to advance the future of Game Preservation. Your work will help identify and outline the specific requirements and technical boundaries for preserving game content, build scalable emulation solutions, and ensure a fun gameplay experience for all players. Our technology solutions are a critical part of enabling the Xbox goal of allowing players to continue to enjoy their games across devices.

As a Senior Software Engineer in Game Preservation, you will diagnose and debug title stability and performance issues and implement robust solutions. The investigations you lead may involve any aspect of the application stack, from title code, to the operating system, to the underlying hardware itself. Often, this will require working with limited access to debugging symbols and source code. To be productive in this role, you must be able to formulate and test hypotheses, make prudent choices about which leads to follow, and identify pragmatic solutions.

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:

• Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Creates, implements, optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to establish and improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI).
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of product features and partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive a workgroup's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Collaborates with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a scenario.
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts 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.

Qualifications:

Required/Minimum Qualifications (RQs/MQs)

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#
  • OR equivalent experience
• Experience working on games, game engines/middleware, or on a gaming platform
• Experience with software debugging, reverse engineering, or emulation/virtualization

Preferred Skills

• Ability to diagnose problems and propose effective solutions
• Familiarity with x86-64 assembly and concepts such as ABIs, calling conventions, and how compiled languages like C++ are represented in native machine code
• Familiarity with operating systems and basic primitives for threading/synchronization, file I/O, and memory management
• Experience using low-level debuggers such as WinDbg or GDB/LLDB
• Experience with reverse engineering and binary analysis tools such as IDA Pro or Ghidra
• Experience with profilers and other performance analysis tools
• Experience working on emulation or virtualization software
• Proficient communication and collaboration skills to work effectively across teams

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: ;br>
Microsoft will accept applications for the role until July 29, 2025.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form .

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.