Software Engineer II

Azure AI Search and AI Knowledge power mission-critical search, retrieval, and knowledge experiences used by customers worldwide. As AI workloads continue to grow, operational excellence, service reliability, and developer productivity are essential to delivering world-class customer experiences. 

We are looking for a Software Engineer II to join the AI Knowledge engineering team and help build the next generation of observability, operational intelligence, automation, deployment, and supportability platforms that enable Azure AI services to operate reliably and efficiently at global scale. 

In this role, you will develop cloud-scale systems that help engineers understand service health, diagnose problems faster, automate operational workflows, improve deployment safety, and accelerate incident resolution. You will work across monitoring, alerting, telemetry, diagnostics, release health, supportability infrastructure, AI-assisted operations, and operational insights. 

You will collaborate with engineering, reliability, operations, customer support, and platform teams to build reusable capabilities that improve reliability, reduce operational burden, and enhance the customer support experience. This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of AI, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and service operations while helping shape how large-scale AI services are built and operated. 

As a team, we are proud of what we build and how we build it. We operate with a customer-focused, evidence-based mindset, value ownership and learning, and believe in a people-first approach to sustainably building and running 24x7 cloud services. This culture aligns with the broader Azure AI Search engineering environment where engineers have meaningful ownership of both product innovation and operational excellence.

Responsibilities 

• Design, implement, test, and operate components of monitoring, alerting, telemetry, diagnostics, and operational intelligence platforms for large-scale Azure services. 

• Develop automation that improves incident detection, enrichment, triage, routing, mitigation, recovery, and operational communications. 

• Build dashboards and analytics that provide actionable visibility into service health, reliability, and customer impact. 

• Contribute to scalable logging, metrics, tracing, diagnostics, and audit infrastructure. 

• Develop deployment pipeline and release engineering capabilities, including automated validation, deployment health monitoring, operational readiness checks, safe rollout automation, and release verification. 

• Investigate production issues using service telemetry and diagnostics, and partner with engineers to implement durable fixes. 

• Participate in DevOps and livesite operations, contributing to service quality, availability, performance, and operational excellence. 

• Use AI-assisted engineering and automation tools to improve development, testing, incident investigation, and operational efficiency. 

• Collaborate with engineering, operations, and support teams to improve service supportability and the customer experience. 

• Follow engineering best practices for security, privacy, quality, reliability, accessibility, and inclusive product development. 

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. 

• 3+ years of software engineering experience. 

• Experience with one or more modern programming languages such as C#, C++, Java, or Python. 

• Experience building, testing, shipping, and supporting production software, cloud services, distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or operational tooling. 

• Experience with telemetry, monitoring, alerting, logging, metrics, tracing, diagnostics, automation, or incident-management systems. 

• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, cloud platforms, or service operations. 

• Strong problem-solving, debugging, troubleshooting, analytical, and communication skills. 

• Ability to independently own scoped features from design through implementation, validation, deployment, and production support. 

• Effectiveness at collaborating with diverse groups of people, openness to feedback, bias for action, and comfort working through ambiguity. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with operational intelligence, site reliability engineering (SRE), production operations, or service engineering. 

• Experience building deployment pipelines, release orchestration systems, rollout automation, deployment health monitoring, or service validation frameworks. 

• Experience with service APIs, data-processing systems, event-driven architectures, or reusable infrastructure components. 

• Experience applying AI-assisted engineering tools, agents, or intelligent automation to coding, testing, incident investigation, or operational workflows. 

• Experience with search technologies, information retrieval, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or AI-powered applications. 

• Ability to reason about distributed services and troubleshoot across application, compute, network, storage, caching, messaging, and load-balancing layers. 

• Experience engaging with customers or support teams to understand scenarios and resolve service issues. 

• Commitment to security, privacy, accessibility, responsible AI, and customer-focused engineering. 

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.  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.  

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.