Principal Software Engineer

Share job

Join the Release Infrastructure team as a Principal Software Engineer and help build the backbone that enables thousands of Teams developers to ship features to millions of users worldwide. You’ll own cross-organizational programs, remove barriers, and enable thousands of Teams developers to ship to millions with confidence. You’ll drive architecture and operational excellence for large-scale systems, applying industry-leading practices and AI to push our platform forward. You’ll mentor senior engineers, level up teams, and formalize standards that scale across the organization. In this role, your leadership shapes our product direction and priorities.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Proven ability to act as tech lead for cross‑team programs.
• Track record of owning architecture and technical direction for large, distributed systems and developer platforms.
  
• Demonstrated multiplier impact - mentoring senior engineers and uplifting engineering standards across teams.
  
• Experience driving operational excellence and incident response improvements.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with Azure cloud infrastructure and Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Ability to shape product discovery by leveraging insights and metrics, developing hypotheses and success criteria, and ensuring features deliver sustainable, long-term value.
• Proven ability to thrive in multi-national, culturally diverse environments.

• Partner with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
• Lead identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Lead by example and mentor others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Leverage subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Hold accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seek new knowledge and adapt to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.