{"id":2922742,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead","title":"Principal AI Optimization Software Engineer Group Lead","company":{"id":18,"name":"Microsoft","domain":"microsoft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/microsoft","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":279,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.832,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":28,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Tel Aviv, Israel"],"countries":["IL"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":88000,"max_usd":264000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":2085},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":true},{"name":"Speculative Decoding","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-19T16:17:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-23T00:36:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"OverviewThe AI Frameworks Group builds the software foundation that enables Microsoft to deploy and run AI models efficiently across a rapidly evolving set of hardware platforms. Our mission is to ensure that every relevant AI model runs as efficiently as possible on every Microsoft AI accelerator. Because AI powers nearly every Microsoft product and service, our work directly shapes the performance, scalability, and profitability of the entire company. At Microsoft's scale, even modest efficiency gains translate into outsized infrastructure cost savings, making this one of the highest-impact engineering opportunities in the company.\nWe are looking for an accomplished engineering leader to build and lead the AI Optimization team: a group of expert engineers pushing the limits of AI performance through ML algorithm innovation, advanced AI compilation and hardware optimization, runtime and serving optimizations, and distributed execution.\nIn this role you will set the technical vision and strategy for AI optimization across Microsoft's AI hardware portfolio. You will own the roadmap, drive execution, and partner with senior leaders across model, systems, compiler, and hardware organizations to deliver step-change gains in performance, scalability, and efficiency for Microsoft's most critical AI workloads.\nResponsibilities\nPeople Management\nManagers deliver success throughempowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.\n\nCoding\nProvides technical leadership during code reviews for a solution/product area to assure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Brings expertise to code reviews to help improve code quality, proactively coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills. Ensures coding standards are followed. Screens for and establishes best practices in reviews and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process.\nLeads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across the company that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while accounting for and incorporating relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Leads efforts to identify and anticipate blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalate them, and communicate how they will impact timelines, and then drives the identification and implementation of strategies and/or opportunities to address them.\nActs as an expert on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions through while developing code before issues occur across products and teams in production. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations. Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, and owns the implementation of repair actions and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence. Drives applying least-access principles, using logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and champions those practices across the team.\nDesign\nEstablishes best practices and mentors others to create a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code. Establishes best practices and mentors others on ensuring test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Provides technical leadership on adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite across a solution or product. Mentors others on, and builds testable code and considers testability during design across solutions and/or products. Acts as a thought leader for understanding different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintaining up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applies them across the architecture as appropriate. Designs and executes plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code across solutions and/or products. Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation.\nOversees, influences, and owns efforts and design discussions for the overall system architecture of entire products/solutions that are deeply complex and often ambiguous. Owns the testing and exploration of various design options for entire products/solutions, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Owns creating proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and deeply complex proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Proactively identifies and evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines and advocates for how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Provides technical leadership to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through deeply complex data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Reviews deeply complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.\nProvides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and incorporating them into the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. Leads the active identification of other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Helps to create relationships and links impacting upstream and downstream interactions between systems and ensures security, compliance, performance, and reliability can be achieved across the entire stack. Drives coordination and collaboration with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap. Enables and fosters communications and proactively negotiates across teams to resolve conflicts around dependency ownership and required work. Drives agreements between dependent teams to align to the delivery schedule.\nEngineering Excellence\nApplies and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.\nRemains current by investing time and effort into being informed staying abreast of current developments. Proactively seeks new knowledge, evaluating new trends, technical solutions, and patterns, assessing how to adapt them to current problems, and shares knowledge with other engineers. Conducts learning and literary sessions to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge).\nLeads efforts to use and enhance, or build, new software developer tools to support easier, faster, and more effective software engineering across products. Identifies whether open source or internal code is available to address coding needs for a set of products, and reuses it in a responsible manner where applicable. Develops substantial skills in tools inside and outside current areas of expertise. Leads identification and/or creation of tools that are useful for building the product. Shares best practices and teaches others about new tools and strategies.\nCollaborates with partner teams to ensure a set of products work well with the components of the partner team, ensuring proper end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance, and DRI escalation pathways are established before going live.\nConsiders and leads the identification of requirements for, and the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products.\nImplement\nLeads efforts for experiments that determine the impact of changes using feature flags/flighting in their code, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value. Drives collaboration efforts with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to ensure incorporation of success and guard rail metrics for experimentation.\nLeverages their deep subject-matter expertise to partner with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) to lead multiple products' project plans, release plans, and work items. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates only the most critical issues. Owns efforts to ensure required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning. Drives efforts to ensure project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Proactively drives efforts to ensure all code across multiple products/solutions is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents. Calculates capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of complex solutions. Drives making considerations for efficient operation of a set of complex products and/or solutions after it is live. Drives proactively establishing rollback plans for a set of complex products and/or solutions.\nLeads leveraging existing deployment frameworks in the implementation of solutions within the existing framework, driving the automation of deployment tasks where possible to ensure efficiency. Drives following safe change deployment best practices (including ensuring that flights are set correctly) for their team to minimize adverse impact to users and other services. Optimizes deployments across products and components to meet differing business objectives. Leads efforts to e...","description_format":"text","description_chars":18235,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":3,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Console Games","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","Gaming Consoles","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T12:33:44Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-23T03:27:26Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":5720,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-24T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/microsoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-ai-optimization-software-engineer-group-lead"}]}