Principal Software Engineer

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Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation (CO+I) team builds and operates Microsoft datacenters, which in turn power Microsoft’s cloud business. We anticipate and provide capacity for continuous scale. The CO+I Engineering team (CO+IE) delivers services, applications, and automation supporting datacenter planning, construction, and operation. We own a large portfolio of services, including workflows that enable predicable, lowest cost datacenter construction, telemetry systems that drive high availability and optimized energy usage, and task and performance management applications that help our operation run as efficiently as possible. CO+I Engineering is a competitive advantage for Microsoft, and an important pillar in its cloud success.

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.

*This role is located either in one or all hub locations - Atlanta, GA, Washington, D.C., Redmond, WA, San Antonio, TX or Phoenix, AZ.
*Relocation support will be provided, and successful candidates must relocate or reside within 50 miles of the hub office location.
*This role is eligible for hybrid or remote work, up to 50%.

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), or related field AND 6+ years of technical support, technical consulting experience, or information technology experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience in architectural leadership, driving reliability, telemetry, and operational workflows through safe deployment practices.
• 4+ years of experience working through the full product cycle from initial design to rapid production deployment.
• 4+ years of experience working across multiple teams and disciplines and ability to influence without authority.
• 5+ years of experience leading highly complex initiatives across multiple organizations.

Other Requirements:

• 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: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field AND 8+ years of Hands-on experience on designing, coding and delivering software solutions at scale
• Proven track record of architecting and delivering distributed cloud services (Azure preferred).
• Experience creating and shipping V1 products using modern development practices.
• Experience using agile methodologies and/or test-driven development (TDD).
• Experience with shipping software products across multiple platforms/devices
• Analytical, problem-solving, testing and debugging skills

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 29, 2025.

We are looking for a passionate, innovative, high energy individual contributor who can deal with ambiguity and challenge the status-quo to deliver automation capabilities that power the planning and execution efforts, drive workflow improvements and build solutions to assist in the delivery of large-scale data centers through efficient management of cost and schedule. You will:

• Own complex, critical services and components end-to-end. Lead design and implementation of scalable, secure, and reliable systems, make architecture decisions, define service boundaries.
• Author design documents, present tradeoffs and decisions to leadership, and provide status/health signals with clarity and accountability
• Lead technical strategy and roadmaps. Translate business objectives into engineering plans, set technical direction for a product area, decompose ambiguous problems into executable work, and drive multi‑release roadmaps with measurable outcomes.
• Establish and champion best practices for code quality, testing, observability, performance, availability, and operational excellence (including (Designated Responsible Individual) DRI/on‑call ownership, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, and post‑mortems)
• Design for resiliency and cost efficiency, leverage Azure and Microsoft services where appropriate; instrument services with telemetry to drive data‑informed iteration
• Write high quality, maintainable, reusable code following SOLID principles.
• Unblock others, perform deep design and code reviews, coach senior engineers, and multiply team impact through reusable frameworks, patterns, and libraries.
• Partner with PM, Design, Data/Applied Science, and other engineering teams, manage dependencies, influence stakeholders to converge on pragmatic, high‑impact solutions.
• Build automated test strategies (unit, integration, end‑to‑end), CI/CD pipelines, and safe deployment practices; use canarying/feature flags to de‑risk releases.
• Identify opportunities to integrate Copilot/agentic workflows or platform primitives to improve user and developer experiences.
• Share learnings and code assets developed with the CO+I engineering team.