Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Commercial Engineering & AI (CEAI) partners closely with stakeholders to accelerate the transformation of Microsoft's commercial business into a frontier organization. We bring together AI-native engineering, modern platforms, and deep commercial insight to reimagine how work gets done - at scale and with impact.

Our mission is to unlock new ways of operating through intelligent systems while creating the conditions for our teams to do the most meaningful work of their careers. If you're excited to build, experiment, and shape the future of commercial execution with AI at the core, we invite you to apply.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate distributed services and microservices on Azure (App Service, AKS, Functions, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL) that power catalog, search, purchase, fulfillment, metering, and billing experiences.
• Own significant features and subsystems end to end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and live site support.
• Drive architectural decisions across platform capabilities such as offer publishing, catalog, search, purchase, fulfillment, metering, and billing.
• Integrate AI capabilities such as natural language processing, semantic search, and intelligent agents using frameworks like Azure OpenAI, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent.
• Drive performance, scalability, and cost efficiency through telemetry, asynchronous I/O, and system profiling.
• Ensure robust data validation, schema enforcement, and compliance with privacy and security standards.
• Collaborate across disciplines to define technical requirements, review designs, and deliver high quality software.
• Mentor engineers across the team, lead technical design reviews, and raise the engineering bar on quality, reliability, and responsible AI practices.
• Participate in an on call rotation; investigate and resolve live site incidents, and drive root cause fixes that improve reliability.
• Contribute to our DevOps culture: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, telemetry, and safe deployment practices.

Qualifications

Required/minimum 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 equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

1. 10+ years of experience in software engineering.
2. Proficiency in C#, Python, or JavaScript, and familiarity with cloud platforms like Azure or AWS.
3. Experience designing and consuming REST APIs and working with relational and/or NoSQL data stores.
4. Solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and debugging.
5. Experience with AI development tools and frameworks (e.g., OpenAI APIs, transformers, semantic search).
6. Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, GitHub workflows, and infrastructure-as-code.
7. Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
8. Demonstrated ability to lead design efforts and deliver production-grade solutions.
9. Experience building or operating large-scale cloud services on Azure or another major cloud.
10. Familiarity with commerce, billing, or marketplace/storefront systems.
11. Experience with Kubernetes, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput data pipelines.
12. Experience building LLM-powered applications RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, agent frameworks (Semantic Kernel, LangChain), or fine-tuning with an eye for evaluation, latency, and cost.
13. Strong written communication: design docs, postmortems, customer-facing release notes.
14. Contributions to live-site / SRE practices: monitoring, alerting, incident response.

Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $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:
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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.