Principal Software Engineer

<b>Overview</b><br><div dir="ltr">The Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud (IC3) powers billions of real-time conversations and collaboration experiences across Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Dynamics, and M365. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help build the next generation of intelligent, resilient, and secure communication platforms that enable customers to connect and collaborate at global scale.<br><br>In this role, you will drive engineering excellence through platform modernization, reliability engineering, and operational transformation, delivering meaningful customer and business impact. You will serve as the technical lead for reliability engineering across IC3's business-critical services, drive the identification and remediation of systemic reliability risks, improve service resiliency, develop repair strategies, and validate recovery mechanisms through Game Days and failure testing. Partner with Service Owners, SREs, and engineering teams to harden architectures, reduce customer-impacting incidents, and improve operational readiness through engineering excellence, automation, and AI-assisted operations.</div><div dir="ltr"><br>This position is based in Redmond, Washington and requires the employee be in the office a minimum of 3 days per week. </div><div dir="ltr"> </div><div dir="ltr">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.</div><br><br><b>Responsibilities</b><br><div dir="ltr"><ul><li><p>Identify and analyze systemic reliability risks across Tier-0 services and drive engineering solutions to address them.</p></li><li><p>Lead complex repair efforts and reliability investments that improve service resilience and availability.</p></li><li><p>Design and execute Game Days, failure injection testing, chaos experiments, and disaster recovery validations.</p></li><li><p>Review service architectures and influence design decisions to improve fault tolerance, scalability, and recoverability.</p></li><li><p>Develop reliability engineering frameworks, standards, and best practices that can be adopted across services.</p></li><li><p>Drive automation of incident mitigation, diagnosis, and recovery workflows to reduce operational toil.</p></li><li><p>Partner with service teams on root cause analysis and ensure learnings are translated into sustainable engineering improvements.</p></li><li><p>Define and measure reliability outcomes through service health indicators, resiliency metrics, and operational readiness assessments.</p></li></ul></div><br><br><b>Qualifications</b><br><h3>Required Qualifications:</h3><div><ul><li>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<ul><li>OR equivalent experience.</li></ul></li></ul></div><div><p><strong>Other Requirements:</strong></p><p>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:</p><ul><li>Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.</li></ul><h3> Preferred Qualifications:</h3><div><ul><li>Master'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 Python<ul><li>OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or 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 </li><li>OR equivalent experience. </li></ul></li><li>6+ years of experience building and operating large-scale cloud services.</li><li>Experience with C#, Java, Python, C++, or similar modern programming languages.</li><li>Experience designing and developing distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native applications.</li><li>Experience working with Azure or other hyperscale cloud platforms.</li><li>Live Site, analytical, debugging, and problem-solving skills with a focus on operational excellence.</li><li>Communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills.</li><li>Experience operating production services with high reliability, availability, and performance requirements.</li><li>Background in observability, monitoring, logging, diagnostics, and service health engineering.</li><li>Experience building or applying AI/ML solutions for engineering productivity, incident management, automation, or reliability scenarios.</li><li>Experience developing agentic systems, intelligent copilots, or AI-assisted operational workflows.</li><li>Demonstrated success automating manual operational processes and reducing engineering toil.</li><li>Experience with incident management, and reliability engineering practices.</li><li>Passion for using AI and automation to transform how large-scale services are built, operated, and supported.</li><li>Experience driving platform modernization initiatives that improve scalability, efficiency, and customer outcomes.</li><li>Passionate about leading Live Site Engineering for driving systemic engineering reliability risks and fixing them. </li><li>Distributed Systems knowledge and work experience.</li><li>Prior experience building products at scale.</li></ul></div></div> <br><br><p>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. </p><p></p> <p>Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:<br><a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay">https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay</a></p><br><p>This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.</p><br><hr><br><p>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 <a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html"><b><u>requesting accommodations.</u></b></a></p>