Principal Software Engineer

Commercial Engineering & AI (CEAI) is modernizing how Microsoft builds and operates customer, partner, and employee experiences for its commercial business. CEAI brings together agents, engineering tools, data, insights, and direct customer feedback to shorten the path from business need to measurable impact and help Microsoft’s commercial business operate as a frontier organization.

The AI Engineering Excellence team defines and scales how CEAI applies AI across the software lifecycle. We establish engineering practices, workflows, and reusable capabilities that teams can adopt broadly while incubating breakthrough approaches that are not yet ready to standardize. AI-native engineering spans the full journey—from understanding customer needs and shaping solutions to building, validating, deploying, operating, and continuously improving them—not merely generating code with AI.

Our primary focus is defining, analyzing and improving the agent-driven workflows that drive the software development lifecycle. We prove these capabilities in real engineering environments, measure their impact, turn successful patterns into repeatable practices and scale them across the organization. We will also identify where the organization can benefit from common foundations and platform capabilities, incubate services and tools and scale and operate them. We see a generational opportunity to expand human creativity and productivity through rapid experimentation, disciplined measurement, and continuous learning.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be a founding technical leader for this mission. You will define the architecture and engineering approach for agent-driven SDLC workflows, turn ambiguous problems into pragmatic technical plans, and lead capabilities from experiment through production adoption and measurable impact. You will remain hands-on—building prototypes and production systems, evaluating emerging models, frameworks, harnesses and tools, making consequential design tradeoffs, and partnering with engineering teams to improve developer productivity, ship velocity, reliability, and the overall engineering experience.

• Define the technical vision, architecture, and engineering roadmap for major AI-native engineering workflows and platform capabilities that CEAI will build, validate, operate, and scale.
• Analyze end-to-end software-development workflows and identify where agents, automation, and shared engineering capabilities can create the greatest value for developers and the business.
• Design, prototype, and build production-grade agent-driven workflows, services, and tools that span planning, implementation, testing, review, deployment, operations, and learning.
• Establish clear interfaces, engineering standards, design documents, and reusable implementation patterns that enable other teams to build on and extend the work safely.
• Evaluate emerging AI development tools, models, and platforms in representative production scenarios, applying sound judgment to reliability, security, quality, cost, performance, and human oversight.
• Lead 0→1 technical incubation from testable hypothesis to working capability, validate it with real engineering teams, and scale, redirect, or stop the work based on measurable results.
• Identify, incubate, and evolve common foundations and platform capabilities that improve engineering workflows across the organization, then help scale and operate the resulting services and tools.
• Own production outcomes for the capabilities you lead, including operational readiness, observability, security, reliability, performance, cost, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Influence technical direction across engineering organizations, resolve cross-system dependencies, and align senior stakeholders through clear technical reasoning and demonstrated results.
• Model AI-native engineering in your own work, mentor engineers, raise the quality bar for design and implementation, and help teams adopt effective practices through working software and practical guidance.

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years of technical engineering experience OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience OR equivalent experience.
• Proven success leading the architecture and delivery of complex production systems or developer platforms across multiple teams and technical domains.
• Hands-on experience using current generative AI models, coding agents, and engineering platforms to build production software, with demonstrated judgment about evaluation, reliability, security, and human oversight.
• Experience improving engineering execution at organizational scale through developer workflows, engineering systems, operating practices, or developer experience, with measurable outcomes.
• Deep technical expertise in one or more areas such as cloud platforms, distributed systems, developer tooling, identity and security, observability, CI/CD, testing infrastructure, or safe deployment, with working knowledge across adjacent areas.
• Experience building and operating products for developers, AI-enabled engineering workflows, internal developer platforms, paved roads, developer tooling, or cloud infrastructure in complex brownfield environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, make sound architecture and engineering tradeoffs, and take capabilities from 0→1 through production operation and broad adoption.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify complex technical problems, align senior stakeholders, mentor engineers, and drive durable change across a matrixed organization without direct authority.

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.