Principal Software Engineer/ Architect

Job Description

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer / Architect. Location: Redmond, Washington, United States

Work Arrangement: Hybrid, 3 days per week in-office

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical vision for Microsoft's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) platform.
• Partner with engineering, product management, and security teams to modernize and secure certificate lifecycle management across public and private PKIs.
• Architect and build highly resilient, scalable, low-latency services that establish trust boundaries and secure access to online resources.
• Enable cryptographic agility across Microsoft's first-party and third-party ecosystems;
• Drive adoption of modern cryptographic standards and prepare Microsoft's ecosystem for emerging technologies, including post-quantum cryptography.
• Design secure, reliable, observable, and reusable platform capabilities supporting identity and authorization services at scale.
• Use telemetry and data to guide architectural decisions and continuously improve performance, reliability, and security.
• Champion engineering excellence through system design, design reviews, code reviews, automation, testing, and operational best practices.
• Write clean, maintainable, high-quality code that meets security, performance, and scalability requirements.
• Improve service reliability, test coverage, diagnosability, observability, and overall service health.
• Collaborate across Microsoft to deliver secure-by-default solutions that simplify adoption and strengthen customer trust.
• Drive development of identity and authorization platform capabilities used by engineers across Microsoft;
• Foster a customer-focused, data-driven, and growth-oriented engineering culture.
• Contribute to the development of Microsoft's next-generation PKI platform supporting the complete lifecycle of public and private certificates.
• Help architect trust at hyperscale for critical workloads and services.
• Embed security, compliance, and least-privilege principles into platform architecture.
• Improve automation, reliability, and operational efficiency across the platform.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience involving coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience architecting distributed systems.
• Experience building scalable and reliable software solutions.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills;
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and efficient code.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, including diagnosing issues, identifying root causes, and implementing effective solutions.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements.
• Successful candidates must pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred:

• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience, or a Bachelor's degree with 15+ years of technical engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as C#, Rust, Go, Java, or C++.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and services;
• Experience architecting large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience designing secure and resilient platforms.
• Experience with cryptographic systems, PKI, certificate lifecycle management, identity, or authorization technologies.
• Understanding of cryptographic agility and emerging cryptographic standards.
• Experience preparing systems for post-quantum cryptography is relevant to the role.

Benefits and Compensation:

• Base salary of $165,600-$296,400 per year for most U.S. locations.
• Base salary of $220,800-$331,200 per year for positions in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area.
• Certain roles may also qualify for additional benefits and compensation;
• Microsoft provides a comprehensive benefits program for eligible employees.
• Compensation varies based on location, skills, experience, and other job-related factors.