Cloud & AI Principal Solution Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 5, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 29, 2026. Microsoft scores B on the Alion truth index.
Are you passionate about cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) applications and interested in solving complex technical challenges? We invite you to join Microsoft as a Cloud & AI Principal Solution Engineer supporting commercial customers. In this role, you will work on innovative projects that use Microsoft technologies to drive meaningful customer impact while collaborating across teams and continuing to develop your technical expertise.
Microsoft is transforming the developer experience for cloud and AI applications across the development lifecycle. Through AI Foundry and its integration with Azure AI, we are advancing agentic AI development, where AI agents help streamline development and operations. As a Cloud & AI Principal Solution Engineer, you will help customers adopt these technologies to improve productivity, drive innovation, and advance their AI capabilities. You will also help enterprise AI developers realize the potential of Microsoft’s AI-powered technology stack across the development lifecycle.
In this role, you will collaborate with engineering leaders and platform teams to accelerate adoption of AI Foundry, Azure AI, and Responsible AI through hands-on engagements, including proofs of concept, hackathons, and architecture workshops. You will guide customers through secure and scalable solution design, influence technical decisions, and help integrate AI application development into deployment workflows. You will help customers modernize applications and realize the value of Microsoft’s AI platform while developing your business acumen, technical expertise, and solution design and deployment capabilities.
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.
Responsibilities
- Drive technical sales engagements with decision-makers by using demonstrations and proofs of concept to influence solution design and enable production deployments
- Lead hands-on engagements, including hackathons, collaborative coding sessions, and architecture workshops, to accelerate adoption of Microsoft developer tools and cloud platforms
- Build trusted relationships with developers and platform leaders to co-design secure and scalable architectures and solutions
- Resolve technical blockers and address objections while collaborating with engineering teams to share customer insights and improve products
- Maintain expertise in AI Foundry and application architecture, including agentic AI frameworks, Semantic Kernel, the Foundry software development kit, Responsible AI, cloud-native development, application programming interfaces, containerization, microservices, event-driven architectures, Python, Java, and .NET
- Maintain and grow expertise in AI management and security
- Represent Microsoft through thought leadership in developer communities and customer forums
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 7+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience
Other Requirements:
- This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship
Preferred Qualifications:
- 8+ years of technical pre-sales, technical consulting, technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience
- 6+ years of experience with cloud, hybrid, or on-premises infrastructure, architecture design, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management
- Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines, such as Office 365, Power BI, Azure architecture and development, cloud platform technologies, information security, or architecture
- Proficiency in agentic AI frameworks, AI management, and security, including generative AI operations, Microsoft Sentinel, Responsible AI, orchestration, and monitoring
- Experience with one or more development frameworks, tools, or programming languages, such as GitHub, Copilot Studio, Visual Studio Code, Jupyter, PyCharm, Node.js, Python, Java, C#, C++, or AI-assisted development tools
- Understanding of full-stack application architecture design and modernization and cloud-native development, including application programming interfaces (APIs), containerization, microservices, event-driven architectures, Python, Java, and .NET
- Familiarity with AI orchestration, including agentic AI frameworks, AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, the Foundry software development kit (SDK), Responsible AI, fine-tuning, and inferencing
- Proven ability to lead technical engagements, such as hackathons, proofs of concept (PoCs), and minimum viable products (MVPs), that drive production-scale outcomeshas context menu
Solution Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 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 $165,600 - $272,300 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.