Principal Software Engineer

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Azure Front Door (AFD) is the global edge for Microsoft and many of our customers—accelerating and protecting internet-scale apps with ultra-low latency, high availability, and robust security.
The Dataplane team builds and operates high-performance edge services behind traffic termination, TLS/QUIC, HTTP/2–3, routing, caching, rate limiting, and L4/L7 DDoS protections that keep Microsoft and customer workloads safe and fast worldwide.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll architect low-latency proxies, advance HTTP/3, strengthen L4/L7 DDoS defenses, and lead reliability at global scale. You’ll set technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner across Azure to deliver secure, fast, and resilient internet-facing experiences.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive.

Sydney based role

Required

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical discipline AND 10+ years building and operating distributed systems or networking platforms in production; track record of delivering high‑throughput, low‑latency services.
• Strong systems programming proficiency in C/C++ and/or Rust (Go acceptable) with deep understanding of memory, concurrency, async I/O, and performance profiling (perf/eBPF/flamegraphs).
• Expertise in networking & protocols: TCP/UDP, DNS, TLS, HTTP/1.1–3, QUIC; load balancing algorithms; congestion control; connection pooling; keep‑alive; retry/backoff.
• Linux fundamentals (kernel & networking stack), containerization/orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD, safe releases, and observability (metrics/traces/logs).
• Proven live‑site leadership: incident command, debugging in production, mitigation design, and preventative engineering at scale.
• Experience building services on cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS.

Preferred

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Rust, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in the above languages.
• CDN/edge proxy experience (e.g., NGINX/Envoy/ATS) or custom proxy pipelines.
• DDoS mitigation (L3/4 and L7), rate limiting, abuse detection, traffic shaping, and resiliency patterns (hedged requests, circuit breakers).
• At‑scale telemetry systems (e.g., Kusto/Geneva), capacity planning, and performance/COGS optimization.
• Cryptography/TLS internals, certificate lifecycle, HSM/KMS integrations.
• Experience with Azure networking/compute primitives and large multi‑tenant services.

Other Requirements

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including:
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: Required upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

• Architect and build internet-scale, low-latency edge services (proxies, load balancers, TLS offload, routing pipelines, caching layers) across hundreds of global sites and thousands of nodes.
• Design and build services that provide L4/L7 DDoS protection, HTTP-level CDN, global load balancing, and WAF capabilities.
• Lead reliability by design: champion SLOs, error budgets, and graceful degradation patterns; instrument systems end-to-end (metrics/traces/logs), drive telemetry-driven engineering and automated mitigations.
• Lead identification of dependencies and development of design documents for products, applications, services, or platforms.
• Mentor engineers and lead by example to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Own live-site for AFD services: participate in DRI/on-call, guide incident response, lead post-incident reviews, and convert findings into systemic fixes and automation.
• Proactively seek new knowledge and adapt to trends, technical solutions, and patterns that improve availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance at scale.