Principal Software Development Engineer - XBOX Product Growth

Overview

At XBOX, we have an ambitious goal to reach 1B daily active users by helping more people discover games, connect with others, and play wherever they are. Over the past 25 years, XBOX has built a passionate global community, innovative hardware and services, and some of the world's most beloved gaming franchises. How people discover, access, and engage with games is changing rapidly, creating new opportunities for Xbox to grow. XBOX Growth helps unlock these opportunities and reach new audiences through a rigorous, data-informed approach. We combine data, analytics, and product experimentation to learn what works and build experiences that attract, engage, and retain users. Our work enables teams across XBOX to turn insights into measurable impact for users and the business.

Join the XBOX Growths Product team and help build the exemplar of a small engineering team leveraging data informed decision making, agile product engineering, and experimentation. You will sit at the intersection of product design, engineering, and data, crafting experiments that shape how millions of players discover, return to, and stay engaged with XBOX. XBOX is currently resetting its strategy to focus on Core, Content, Creation, and Connection. Growth Product focuses on the Core pillar, through winning on console, delighting players, and giving them reasons to come back and experience the magic of gaming in our ecosystem. This role is about shipping fast, learning through data backed experimentation, iterating on what works and building learning and judgement on what does not. You will work across the whole stack, the whole player journey, and multiple feature areas; no feature area is off limits and this team chooses work based on impact not organizational boundaries. You will accelerate and define data driven development through AI enhanced workflows. You will have measurable business impact by turning learnings into leverage and owning ideas through to execution and scaling.

Responsibilities

Experiment

• Shape the future of the XBOX experience. Propose the hypothesis and product vision, not just the technical implementation. Size the opportunity, define success, and execute.
• Design, ship, and iterate on growth experiments across surfaces, services, and feature areas all to increase Console retention and daily active users
• Design telemetry, metrics, and analytics systems so results can be read without ambiguity, and analyze scorecards objectively. Ship what worked and retire what did not, including your own ideas
• Build comfortability with being wrong often, owning learnings, and fast pivots and iteration
• Provide strong product vision. You will form your own opinions about what is worth building, and you can defend a ranked set of hypotheses with the metric each would move

Engineer

• Build across the stack: service, client, and instrumentation work on console, and possibly even web, mobile, or external surfaces from prototype through general availability
• Make focused, reviewable changes in codebases owned by other teams, and leave their owners glad you were there; make the changes others missed and wished they could have done.
• Participate in the teams live-site and on-call rotation
• Demonstrate an ability to enter a large, unfamiliar codebase, orient quickly, and land substantial technical changes to enable team success.

Enhance

• Significantly accelerate the team through agentic workflows and AI evolution across all facets of the engineering lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar through design reviews, code reviews, and engineering practices
• Exercise judgement on experiments. Decide when to scale, iterate, or abandon
• Build secure, reliable, high-performing systems that meet Microsofts privacy, compliance, and security requirements
• Exercise creativity and judgement to balance speed and rigor and find cheap tests for expensive questions and ways to prove impact with minimal upfront investment
• Use hypothesis-driven development to measurably move key metrics

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors 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#, XAML, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years shipping A/B tests end-to-end in production (design instrumentation analysis rollout), including improving experiment quality and guardrails
• Experience in growth engineering, retention, engagement, acquisition, or experimentation-focused teams.
• 6+ years building and shipping full stack features across modern front ends (TypeScript, React, XAML) together with production services (C#, .NET) on cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure
• Demonstrated track record of proposing product ideas that were shipped and measured, and of owning a growth, engagement, retention, or monetization metric across a sequence of experiments
• Experience with cross functional and cross team collaboration including making production changes in codebases owned by other teams, navigating unfamiliar architectures, driving partner review processes, and engaging independently with design, product, and engineering across organizational boundaries
• Experience with large-scale telemetry, metric design, and querying analytics tooling (for example, Kusto, Databricks, or comparable data platforms)
• Demonstrated experience leaning heavily on AI to accelerate engineering velocity, including using AI tools to research, prototype, implement, debug, and iterate on production features
• Experience in shipping consumer products at scale - gaming, entertainment, commerce, or subscription businesses

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.

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.