{"id":1933128,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure","title":"Principal Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure","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":81,"open_postings":298,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.762,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"}},"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":["Washington, United States","Mountain View, 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":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":false},{"name":"Progressive Delivery","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-28T20:49:12Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T18:10:54Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":26,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":26},"description":"OverviewWe are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to advance the reliability and observability architecture of a large-scale, globally distributed AI platform. You will set technical direction and solve complex challenges across runtime, routing, capacity, infrastructure, and specialized hardware.\nThis role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI inference. You will learn how advanced AI models are deployed and operated globally, collaborate with experts across the stack, and build foundational capabilities that directly improve customer experience.\nThis is an ideal role for a technical leader who enjoys solving ambiguous, cross-system problems, mentoring engineers, and shaping engineering practices across an organization.\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\nResponsibilities\nDefine and drive the architecture and technical roadmap for platform reliability, observability, and operational health.\nDesign unified health and telemetry capabilities that connect customer impact with application, capacity, dependency, infrastructure, and deployment signals.\nDevelop platform safeguards for overload protection, capacity management, routing integrity, configuration consistency, and automated isolation and recovery.\nEstablish engineering practices for production validation, progressive delivery, regression detection, fault testing, and automated rollback.\nAdvance end-to-end request tracing and diagnostics across distributed services, including routing, retries, failover, and asynchronous operations.\nLead cross-team architecture efforts, mentor engineers, and turn production learnings into reusable platform capabilities and measurable reliability improvements.\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\n\nOR equivalent experience.\n\nPreferred Qualifications:\nMaster's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or PythonOR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field \nAND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python\nOR equivalent experience. \n\nExperience with AI/ML serving platforms, high-performance computing, accelerator-based infrastructure or other compute-intensive distributed systems.\nExperience with distributed tracing, capacity management, load balancing, admission control, retries, backpressure, and graceful degradation.\nProficiency in Azure Monitoring systems in the Azure ecosystem would be a plus.\nExperience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud services, or other complex production platforms.\nExperience with reliability engineering, observability, service health, telemetry, and production incident response.\nDemonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives and drive alignment across engineering teams and organizational boundaries.\nStrong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical strategy and architectural decisions to engineers and senior leaders.\nOther Requirements:\nAbility 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.\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":5574,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"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":["Artificial Intelligence","Console Games","Gaming Consoles","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-05T22:27:32Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":42,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.554,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":26,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","win:late","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":274800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-25T18:37:49Z","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":26345,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z"}},"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-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure"},{"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-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure"},{"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-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure"},{"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-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-infrastructure"}]}