Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Windows is where most of the world's developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. Coding agents, local inference, containerized toolchains and AI-native workflows are all arriving at once - and the engineering organizations adopting them fastest are the ones whose experience should be shaping Windows.

The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close that loop directly. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers inside their environments, and own the outcome: the customer's developers and agents running production workloads on Windows.

We are measured on adoption. Not revenue, not renewals, not tickets closed. When a customer's engineering organization moves a real workload onto Windows and keeps it there, that is the result.

As a Principal Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you are one of the founding technical leaders of this team. You will own our hardest and most strategic engagements end to end - frontier AI labs, silicon partners, and the enterprise engineering organizations whose adoption decision sets the pattern for everyone watching them - and you will define how forward-deployed engineering works at Windows scale: the engagement model, the technical bar, the reusable asset library, and the path from field evidence into platform roadmaps.

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.

Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

Own the flagship engagements

• Take personal, end-to-end technical ownership of the engagements with the highest stakes: partners building on and alongside Windows, silicon partners whose platforms define the AI developer experience, and enterprise engineering organizations whose choices move the market.
• Discover: get inside a customer's actual engineering reality - their architecture, their roadmap, their constraints, and the honest reason Windows is or is not their default. Establish the problem statement, the baseline, the agreed success measures and the plan.
• Build: work in their codebase and in ours. Design and ship the integrations, prototypes, reference implementations, tooling and platform changes that make adoption real. Apply engineering standards - security, privacy, maintainability, supportability - to work that will run in production long after the engagement ends.
• Validate: prove the outcome with measurement the customer agrees with, not with a demo.
• Stay hands-on: Write the prototypes, read the traces, work in the customer's repository. Your credibility with partner engineering leadership rests on doing the work, not describing it.

Be the technical face of Windows to engineering leadership

• Hold the technical relationship with partner chief technical officers (CTOs), engineering vice presidents (VPs) and principal engineers - and hold the same credibility with the engineers doing the work.
• Deliver unwelcome answers well. Part of this job is telling a customer that Windows is not yet the right answer for something and then owning the plan that changes it.
• Coordinate with Microsoft field, partner and independent software vendor (ISV) teams so the customer experiences one Microsoft rather than several.

Define how this team works

• With the team's manager and the other principal, design the engagement model: how accounts are selected and sequenced, what an engagement commits to, how success is measured, when we say no, and how engagements end.
• Set the technical bar for the team's output - solution quality, security and privacy standards, and the difference between a demo and something a customer can run.
• Build the shared asset library: reference architectures, reusable tooling, diagnostic instrumentation and playbooks that let a small team serve far more customers than it could reach one at a time.

Change the platform

• Convert field evidence into platform direction. Bring the pattern - not the anecdote - to Windows, windows subsystem for linux (WSL), Windows AI, security and developer tooling teams, with reproductions, measurements, architectural analysis and quantified business impact, and drive the change through to shipping.
• Act as a standing technical voice for developer and agentic adoption in WPD planning and escalate when the loop does not close.
• Partner across Microsoft - the enterprise field and commercial engagement teams, silicon and ISV partner teams, and product groups - so engagements compound rather than collide.

Raise everyone around you

• Mentor the FDE team and grow the discipline: review engagement plans and technical output, coach on customer judgement, and help newer engineers get to depth faster.
• Transfer knowledge to Microsoft field and support organizations, and to product teams, so the capability outlives any individual engagement.
• Help the team's manager hire and help define what good looks like at every level of the team.

Deliver measurable adoption outcomes

• Demonstrate adoption through production workloads, telemetry, customer evidence and agreed success measures - across a portfolio, not a single account.
• Communicate findings, tradeoffs, risks and progress clearly to customer engineering leadership, Microsoft field teams, product engineers and executives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor'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.
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• A sustained record of owning the technical relationship with strategic partners or major enterprise engineering organizations, accountable for the outcome rather than for advice - as a forward deployed engineer, partner engineer, principal solutions architect, principal consultant, or technical founder.
• Experience standing up a new team, practice or engagement model from nothing.
• Deep technical credibility across the modern developer and AI stack: LLM application and agent architectures, evaluation, local and hybrid inference, developer environments and toolchains, WSL and containers, performance and reliability analysis of systems you did not write, and the enterprise security and identity controls that constrain all of it.
• Solid programming ability in Python and at least one of TypeScript, C#, Rust, Go, C or C++, with a record of shipping production software recently enough to still be dangerous.
• Demonstrated influence on a platform roadmap driven by customer evidence - you have changed what a product team built and can point to it.
• Experience converting bespoke customer work into durable, reusable assets - reference architectures, tooling, guidance - that scaled well beyond the original engagement.
• Ability to operate with authority in front of executive technical audiences while keeping the respect of the engineers in the room.
• Practices good judgement in ambiguous and commercially sensitive situations, including knowing what to concede, what to escalate, and what to fix quietly.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar of a team.
• Deep Windows platform expertise or demonstrated ability to reach that depth quickly from adjacent platform expertise.
• Familiarity with the Windows app platform - WinUI, WPF, .NET desktop - and with application modernization. Not required for this role, but valuable when a customer's adoption conversation turns to their existing app estate.

#W+DJOBS

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.