Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers to levels they cannot achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, and more openness in a cloud-enabled world. The Business & Industry Copilots group is a rapidly growing organization that is responsible for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of products, Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, AI Builder, Microsoft Industry Solution and more. Microsoft is considered one of the leaders in Software as a Service in the world of business applications and this organization is at the heart of how business applications are designed and delivered. 

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our team! 

The Agent 365 Foundation team owns the compute platform that Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot agent workloads run on, specializing in container orchestration and the isolation layers that keep tenant workloads secure. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction for that platform, own its hardest architectural decisions, and lead multi-team efforts that span compute, networking, identity, and capacity. You will be part of a team of engineers who thrive on solving complex problems at scale while doing it with impeccable quality. 

This is infrastructure engineering with a direct line to the product. The services you lead are the substrate for mission-critical business applications used by some of the largest companies in the world, and the same platform now carries a fast-growing set of agentic AI workloads. Your design choices show up directly in reliability, deployment velocity, and infrastructure cost across the organization. 

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. 

• Sets technical direction and owns the architecture for the platform services and APIs that provision, scale, and secure containerized compute across Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, and Azure Kubernetes Service. 

• Drives multi-team, multi-quarter platform investments from ambiguous problem statements through design, staged rollout, and live-site operation, and holds the resulting systems to Microsoft's reliability, security, and compliance bar. 

• Leads the networking, identity, and isolation strategy of the platform — virtual network integration, subnet delegation, managed identity, and container isolation — and drives secure design principles, least-access practices, and formal validation of security invariants across the team, including the safe execution of untrusted and AI-generated code. 

• Leads efforts on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions while developing code before issues occur in production. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves them with minimal iterations. 

• Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, the implementation of repair actions, and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence, and takes a leading role in the on-call rotation for the services the team owns. 

• Drives capacity planning and infrastructure cost efficiency using telemetry and usage data, and partners with Azure compute, networking, and identity teams to align platform roadmaps with where the agentic workloads are heading. 

• Mentors senior and mid-level engineers, raises design and code quality through reviews, and grows the technical depth of the wider organization by sharing established methods and best practices. 

• Embody our culture and values. 

Required 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. 

Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: 

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.  

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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 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. 

• Deep expertise with container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, and with Azure compute services such as AKS, Azure Container Instances, Service Fabric, or Virtual Machine Scale Sets. 

• Expertise with Microsoft stack technologies, particularly C#, .NET, and core Azure platform services. 

• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and safe deployment practices (for example ARM or Bicep templates and Azure DevOps pipelines). 

• Depth in Azure networking concepts including virtual networks, DNS, load balancing, and multi-tenant isolation. 

• Proven ownership of high-availability services at scale, including on-call leadership, incident command, and root cause analysis. 

• Experience with large-scale observability and diagnostics tooling, such as distributed tracing, metrics, and log analytics. 

• Experience with generative AI, agentic workloads, or LLM/ML systems, and with the infrastructure problems they create. 

• Demonstrated cross-organizational technical leadership, including architecture and design reviews, mentoring engineers, and driving engineering standards beyond a single team. 

#BICJOBS #AGENT365

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.