Principal AI Architect

Overview

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be, and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit of thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

The mission of Learning Product Team in Worldwide Learning (WWL) - is to develop world-class, innovative Skilling Products & Experiences that inspire customers, partners, MCAPS sellers, and future generations to achieve more by skilling, upskilling, and reskilling, thereby reaching 100M+ learners. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

As a Principal AI Architect, you will define and drive the end-to-end Cloud + AI + Agentic architecture for next-generation WWL skilling experiences and platforms. You will partner with engineering and product leadership to deliver secure, reliable, scalable, cost-effective AI systems and establish a roadmap for Agentic-era learning experiences spanning consumer and commercial scenarios.

This is a high-impact architecture leadership role requiring broad technical depth, cross-team influence, and solid collaboration across engineering, product, data, security/compliance, and partner ecosystems-enabling others to execute at scale through shared standards, reusable patterns, and reference implementations.

If you enjoy working in a collaborative and agile environment where you can apply your technical skills and creativity into a security space and thrive on addressing real world problems, we are looking for you.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we're dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their highly qualified contributions each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.

Responsibilities

The Principal AI Architect is responsible for the following:

Architecture Strategy & Roadmap (Cloud + AI + Agentic)

• Own the reference architecture and technical roadmap for WWL's AI/Agentic platform capabilities (e.g., orchestration, tools/plugins, memory, retrieval, evaluation, observability, governance).

• Translate skilling business objectives into platform investments and architectural decisions, balancing speed-to-value with security, compliance, cost, and long-term maintainability.

• Establish clear architectural guardrails and decision frameworks (e.g., "build vs. buy," "Copilot Studio vs. Foundry," "RAG vs. fine-tune," "central vs. federated patterns").

Technical Leadership & Architectural Governance

• Lead architecture/design reviews for major initiatives; drive alignment on system boundaries, contracts, dependency management, and resiliency.

• Define and standardize architecture patterns (multi-tenant SaaS, event-driven architectures, secure data access, model routing, agent safety controls).

• Create reusable templates, "golden paths," and reference implementations to accelerate engineering delivery across teams and reduce fragmentation.

Responsible AI, Security, Privacy, and Compliance by Design

• Embed Responsible AI principles into agentic solution design (human-in-the-loop, safety mitigations, evaluation, transparency, and auditability).

• Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure services meet required controls and operational standards, and to drive alignment between policy intent and implementation.

• Define secure patterns for prompt/data handling, secrets management, identity, and access governance for AI systems.

Platform Reliability, Operability & Cost Management

• Drive architecture that improves reliability, observability, incident response readiness, and cost efficiency across AI-enabled services.

• Establish telemetry standards (quality, safety, latency, cost, success metrics) and ensure teams instrument consistently to enable operational excellence at scale.

• Design for production: rollout/rollback strategies, evaluation gates, and operational playbooks for AI/agent releases.

Cross-Org Influence & Coalition Building

• Build coalitions across WWL and broader Microsoft engineering/product groups to deliver complex, large-scale initiatives; resolve long-standing misalignments; and hold stakeholders accountable for commitments.

• Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior stakeholders, creating clarity, driving alignment, and enabling execution across multiple teams and disciplines.

Mentorship, Technical Community, and Talent Scaling

• Mentor engineers; enhance architecture quality, engineering discipline, and Responsible AI rigor.

• Contribute to internal technical communities through documentation, brown bags, and reusable engineering guidance-amplifying impact through others.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field 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.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering 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 Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.

• 10+ experience in software engineering or solution architecture, with demonstrable success building and operating complex systems.
• 10+ experience designing, implementing, and optimizing AI solutions encompassing data pipelines, model training and serving, and production MLOps.
• 10 + years of full-stack development across frontend, backend, and cloud infrastructure, with a proficient command of data engineering, AI/ML systems, and deployment architectures.
• 2+ project experience with NLP and LLM-based systems.
• Proficient coding skills in C#, Python, JavaScript, and React.
• Proven experience designing and shipping AI/ML GenAI solutions, including one or more of:
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enterprise search, vector retrieval
  • LLM orchestration and agentic workflows
  • AI evaluation/monitoring, safety and quality measurement
• Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering cloud-native, distributed systems at scale (multi-service systems, reliability, performance, and operability).
• Proficient engineering fundamentals and ability to work "hands-on when needed" (prototyping/reference implementations, architectural spike investigations, debugging complex issues).
• Track record of cross-team influence-driving alignment and execution across multiple disciplines and stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences; comfort presenting senior leadership.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.