Senior Applied AI Engineer

Are you a customer-obsessed, AI-curious problem-solver who thrives in an inclusive, collaborative global team? Join Engineering Operations (EngOps), the organization driving operational excellence across the Microsoft Cloud to strengthen quality, reliability, security, and customer trust.

Our mission is to prevent issues before they happen by turning operational signals into action through AI-powered automation, enabling measurable customer impact at cloud scale. Our culture of empowerment, inclusion, and growth mindset defines how we work.

Within EngOps ACES, the Agent Fleet Operations (AFO) team is looking for an AI-first software engineer to join the Cloud Operational Demand Engineering (CØDE) organization and help advance our mission of driving operational demand to zero. We're seeking a hands-on engineer with a DevOps background - CI/CD and release engineering, safe deployment, observability, and always-on production operations - who pairs that discipline with AI engineering skills and a learn-it-all mindset.

You are passionate about applying AI to solve real customer problems and energized by the challenge of eliminating operational toil.

In this role, you will build and ship production AI solutions that reduce operational demand and improve customer outcomes. You will contribute to the technical execution that turns unresolved cases into autonomously resolved, customer-delighting outcomes - and help build the release, observability, and reliability practices that let a fleet of agents run safely in the customer path.

Role summary

As an individual contributor, you will be hands-on building and improving the agentic patterns that reduce operational demand and improve customer satisfaction. This is a DevOps and production-operations engineering role applied to autonomous AI: you own the delivery, quality, and production health of the components you build, not just their design. This role suits an engineer who has built and shipped production-scale AI systems - and ideally the CI/CD, safe-deployment, and reliability practices around them - and who wants to go deep on agentic resolution while collaborating closely across the team.

Team charter

Build, operationalize, and scale AI-native support experiences for Broad Commercial customers by transforming supportability knowledge into reusable, versioned, testable, and measurable assets that power product experiences, support engineers, and autonomous agents. The team reduces support demand, engineering toil, and time-to-resolution through AI-driven resolution capabilities that continuously learn from customer signals, unresolved cases, and operational insights.

AFO operates a fleet of autonomous agents that resolve customer support cases with human oversight. This is a production DevOps discipline, not a set of prototypes: agents run continuously in the customer path and released, observed, and improved with the same rigor as any always-on service. You and your team will build and run this system across several planes of a single AIOps suite:

• Fleet execution and live safety: operating the agents that execute individual cases end to end - evidence acquisition, diagnosis, reasoning, response composition, and safe escalation - alongside the live-safety services that continuously watch sentiment, risk, and unsafe or irreversible actions and can pause autonomy or transfer a case to a human.
• Evaluation and repair: running the evaluation systems that judge per-turn and completed-case quality, and the repair pipelines that turn failures into durable fixes - documentation, diagnostics, prompt/routing/policy changes, reusable skills, or product work items routed to the right engineering team.
• A control and learning plane: owning the lifecycle state machine that moves every change from observed → detected → diagnosed → repair candidate → independently evaluated → approved → shadowed → canaried → released → production-verified, with explicit expand, pause, revise,

Responsibilities

• Build agentic resolution capabilities for AFO
• Build and improve agentic patterns that raise autonomous resolution rate, accuracy, and customer satisfaction, contributing to the team's technical execution.
• Deliver engineering for Agentic AI solutions
• Deliver end-to-end features across autonomous AI systems, including orchestration, reasoning, retrieval, action execution, and human escalation workflows. Take capabilities from prototype through production across support surfaces while partnering effectively across dependent engineering teams.
• Contribute to technical direction and engineering standards
• Help shape the technical foundation for agent development by implementing architectures, design patterns, evaluation frameworks, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Apply and help improve standards for prompts, tool interfaces, testing, versioning, code quality, CI/CD, and safe deployment practices (shadow, canary, progressive rollout, automated rollback) so agent behavior remains reliable, observable, and scalable.
• Build evals that improve customer confidence that our agents are trustworthy in understanding customer sentiment and intent and in validating agentic actions.
• Contribute to production health and reliability
• Help run the service with a DevOps/SRE operating model. Support availability, latency, cost per resolution, SLOs and error budgets, regression detection, incident response, and the on-call rotation for a fleet of agents acting autonomously in the customer path. Build the observability needed to explain why an agent did what it did, and drive durable fixes rather than repeated mitigations.
• Build and maintain evaluation systems
• Contribute to the evaluation framework that determines whether agents are safe and effective in production. Build and maintain golden datasets, rubrics, judge agents, frozen anchors, and offline/online evaluation pipelines. Use evaluation signals to gate releases and continuously improve quality through production feedback loops.
• Contribute to measurable business impact
• Help move key business outcomes, including support demand reduction, autonomous resolution rate, resolution quality, time-to-resolution, engineer productivity, and customer satisfaction. Ensure the capabilities you build are measurable and directed toward the highest-impact opportunities.
• Turn Customer Signals into Engineering Insight
• Build mechanisms that convert unresolved cases, customer feedback, and dissatisfaction signals into actionable engineering insights. Help ensure recurring failure patterns improve future agent capabilities and route product fixes back to the appropriate engineering teams.
• Grow your craft and share learnings
• Deepen your agentic AI and DevOps craft, and extend the team's impact by sharing proven patterns, tools, and operational learnings with your peers.

Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field AND +8 years technical engineering experience in software engineering, applied AI/ML, or distributed systems, OR equivalent experience.

• 8+ years of IT experience and 3+ years of experience using Agentic AI
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building and shipping AI or machine learning systems in production.
• Demonstrated DevOps or SRE background: hands-on experience with CI/CD and release engineering, safe-deployment practices (e.g., blue/green, canary, progressive rollout, automated rollback), observability and monitoring, and participation in production incident response and on-call for always-on services.

Preferred qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, or a related field.
• Experience building and shipping multi-agent orchestration systems or agentic AI services in production.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks: rubrics, golden datasets, judge agents, offline and online evaluation.
• Experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, or comparable enterprise AI platforms.
• Familiarity with agent security patterns: prompt injection defense, tool access controls, data boundary enforcement.
• DevOps/SRE toolchain depth: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, and progressive-delivery tooling (shadow, canary, feature/rollout gating, automated rollback).
• Observability engineering: building tracing, metrics, and logging for distributed or agentic systems and using them to drive durable fixes rather than repeated mitigations.
• Reliability practice: working with SLIs/SLOs and error budgets and taking part in the operational rhythm (live-site reviews, post-incident reviews, repair-item and corrective-action tracking) that keeps a fleet healthy.
• Experience contributing to cross-org or co-development engineering delivery with partner teams.
• Business acumen, with the ability to connect engineering work to measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Background in customer support engineering, supportability, or customer experience platforms.
• Experience operating always-on production services, including on-call participation and incident response.

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.