{"id":3987998,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-data-engineer-xbox-growth","title":"Principal Data Engineer - XBOX Growth","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":84,"open_postings":438,"ghost_share":0.007,"stale_share":0.594,"repost_share":0.039,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","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":["Redmond, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":142800,"max":274800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":274800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":true},{"name":"Copilot","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"Power BI","optional":true},{"name":"Spark","optional":true},{"name":"SQL","optional":true},{"name":"Unity","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-09T17:08:13Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T03:34:14Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"OverviewXBOX is building a semantic data model that gives each Xbox-wide metric one definition and one owner, so dashboards, scorecards and AI agents give the same answer. We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer who is as comfortable defining a metric as building the pipeline behind it. You will lead the design and build of the model on Databricks, work with business owners to certify definitions, and make the data reliable and well described enough for AI agents to answer questions correctly. The model covers the XBOX business, including Game Pass, player engagement, commerce and experimentation. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with influence across XBOX data, analytics and AI teams.\nMicrosoft’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.\nResponsibilities\nLead the design and build of the XBOX semantic model: certified metric definitions, dimensions and metric views on Databricks that dashboards, scorecards and agents all use.\n\nWork with business and product owners to define and certify XBOX-wide metrics. Make the population, grain, time window and caveats explicit, and resolve cases where teams report different numbers for the same metric.\n\nBuild the checks that make a certified metric trustworthy: reconciliation against sources and existing reports, data quality and freshness monitoring, and alerts that catch problems before they reach a dashboard or an agent.\n\nMake Xbox data ready for AI agents. Provide the metadata, lineage, documentation and query patterns agents need to find the right metric, and help build the evaluation sets that measure whether agents answer correctly.\n\nBring data science judgment to the model: use telemetry analysis to choose sound definitions, design metrics that work in A/B experiment scorecards, and explain unexpected metric movements.\n\nSet the standards for publishing certified data, including ownership, lineage, access controls and catalog documentation, and retire duplicate or uncertified assets as their replacements are certified.\n\nLead through influence across the XBOX data organization: review designs, mentor engineers and data scientists, and use AI tools to speed up your own and the team’s work.\n\nQualifications\nRequired Qualifications\nBachelor'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\nOR equivalent experience.\n\nPreferred Qualifications:\n8+ years of experience building and operating production data pipelines and data models, using SQL and Python on Spark-based platforms such as Databricks.\n\nExperience designing a semantic or metric layer (e.g., Databricks Unity Catalog metric views or Power BI semantic models), and dimensional data models.\n\n3+ years of hands-on data science or analytics experience, such as defining product metrics, analyzing large-scale telemetry and applying statistical methods.\n\nExperience designing metrics for online experimentation (A/B testing), including metric sensitivity, variance and guardrail metrics.\n\nExperience validating data and metrics at scale, including reconciliation against source systems and the error tradeoffs of approximate distinct counts.\n\nExperience making data usable by AI agents or LLM applications, such as text-to-SQL, retrieval over catalogs and documentation, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, or evaluation sets that measure answer accuracy.\n\nExperience applying data governance in a large organization, including ownership, lineage, access controls and privacy requirements.\n\nExperience using AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot, in data engineering and analytics work.\n\nExperience with gaming, subscription or other consumer products.\n\nSoftware 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.\nCertain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:\nhttps://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay\nThis position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.\nMicrosoft 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5488,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Gaming Consoles","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","Office & Productivity Software","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-09T22:10:22Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 6,957 · green card filings: 2,767","filings_12m":6957,"filings_prev_12m":10319,"green_card_filings_12m":2767,"median_offered_wage_usd":167541,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-09T07:32:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":886}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T05:42:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":274800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-data-engineer-xbox-growth","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-data-engineer-xbox-growth.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-10T05:42:23Z","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":13254,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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-data-engineer-xbox-growth"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"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-data-engineer-xbox-growth"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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-data-engineer-xbox-growth"},{"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-data-engineer-xbox-growth\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-data-engineer-xbox-growth"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3987998}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"microsoft.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3987998},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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