Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Microsoft
The Core Services Infrastructure and Security team in Microsoft Teams provides the foundational compute, network, security, routing, traffic management, and governance layers that power Microsoft’s real‑time communication experiences across the globe.
As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will help build and operate the mission‑critical components of our distributed systems platform ensuring that Teams remains fast, reliable, secure, and resilient at global scale. You will focus on areas such as network security, front door and gateway infrastructure, routing and load balancing, DNS and CDN systems, and end‑to‑end monitoring and observability.
This is a unique opportunity to deepen your expertise across high‑scale, active‑active architectures while collaborating with seasoned engineers who obsess over reliability and defense‑in‑depth. You will contribute hands‑on implementation work, participate in design discussions, and apply engineering best practices to continually improve the reliability, performance, and security of the platform.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is built on a growth mindset—centered on respect, integrity, and accountability. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where every engineer can thrive.
Responsibilities
Engineering & Operations
- Contribute to the design, implementation, and operation of secure, reliable network and infrastructure services supporting Microsoft Teams’ microservices environment.
- Improve reliability by developing and refining monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and automated recovery mechanisms across critical control‑plane and data‑plane systems.
- Troubleshoot complex issues involving traffic routing, gateway behavior, certificate and TLS issues, DNS, CDN interactions, and network security policies.
Service Ownership & On‑Call
- Serve as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) on a rotational basis triaging incidents, driving mitigations, documenting learnings, and helping improve live‑site processes.
- Participate in root‑cause analyses (RCAs) and implement durable fixes that eliminate recurring issues.
- Optimize the performance, reliability, and availability of services through data‑driven analysis using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing.
Collaboration & Cross‑Team Influence
- Work closely with partner engineering teams (security, networking, microservices, compliance, governance) to deliver integrated improvements across shared infrastructure layers.
- Influence project designs by providing SRE perspective on reliability, scalability, testability, operability, and security.
- Contribute to documentation, patterns, and best practices that raise the operational bar across the broader Teams engineering organization.
Continuous Improvement & Learning
- Identify opportunities for automation using scripts, pipelines, policy‑driven guardrails, or AI‑enabled tooling to reduce manual toil and increase engineering productivity.
- Stay current on emerging technologies, cloud infrastructure patterns, and security developments; apply new techniques to strengthen service reliability and efficiency.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience.
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:
- Experience with core networking concepts including TCP/IP fundamentals, routing, load balancing, CDN, ACL/firewalling, TLS, certificate lifecycle management.
- Ability to diagnose and remediate performance or availability issues using logs, metrics, traces, and standard network troubleshooting tools.
- Hands‑on experience operating services in a cloud environment (Azure or equivalent).
- 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
- Experience with network security, cloud security controls, identity‑driven security policies, and certificate management at scale.
- Familiarity with large‑scale cloud infrastructure (IaaS), microservices patterns, API gateways, and global routing architectures.
- Experience leveraging automation frameworks, scripting, GitOps, Infrastructure‑as‑Code, or AI‑driven tooling to improve reliability and reduce operational load.
- Demonstrated ability to partner across teams, influence without authority, and contribute to multi‑team initiatives or modernization efforts.
Site Reliability Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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
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.