Principal Software Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 4, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026. Microsoft scores B on the Alion truth index.
Team Purpose
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Engineering Systems team at Microsoft builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale. You will help create foundational capabilities spanning service delivery, data storage, graph infrastructure, analytics, stream processing, data pipelines, search, compute, media, and service lifecycle management. Working with AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams, you will help provide reliable and consistent paths from development to production within a multidisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive engineering team.
Role Summary
As a Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure in the AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team, you will serve as a technical leader for multiple key initiatives that build and improve large-scale infrastructure platforms. You will align perspectives across teams, make architectural trade-offs, and guide the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of reusable systems that support business and technology objectives. You will mentor engineers, advance engineering practices, partner with internal and external stakeholders, and influence open-source technologies that contribute to Microsoft's AI infrastructure.
This opportunity will allow you to shape long-term infrastructure strategy, deepen your leadership across complex distributed systems, and strengthen engineering practices across teams and open-source communities.
Microsoft Culture Statement
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
Responsibilities
Drive innovation and deliver software at scale while ensuring architecture, implementation, deployment, and production operations meet reliability, security, compliance, performance, and cost requirements.
Provide architectural guidance and mentorship across teams, and advance engineering craftsmanship through coding, testing, design, observability, and operational best practices.
Design platform-first products, services, tools, and extensible code that can be reused by other teams while accounting for operational impact and long-term maintainability.
Serve as technicallead for multiple key initiatives, identifyproblems and opportunities, and guide teams through architecture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operationalization.
Partner with teams, customers, and technical leadership to align perspectives, resolve dependencies and trade-offs, and execute a long-term vision for core infrastructure.
Participate in and influence relevant open-source projects, evaluate new technologies, and share knowledge and practices with broader engineering communities.
Lead debugging, incident-learning, deployment automation, security hardening, and telemetry improvements that increase quality and reliability across complex infrastructure systems.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Scienceor 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.
Preferred Qualifications
Master's Degree in Computer Scienceor related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Scienceor related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Experience providing architectural or technical leadership across multiple complex engineering initiatives.
Experience designing, building, and operatinglarge-scale distributed systems, databases, or client-server architectures.
Experience architecting data infrastructure, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), AI infrastructure, storage, graph, compute, or platform systems.
Experience influencing open-source projects or participatingin open-source project management and governance.
Other Qualifications
Microsoft Cloud Background Check
Microsoft Background Check
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.