Principal Software Engineer

Overview

The Intelligent Conversation and Communication Cloud (IC3) powers billions of real-time conversations across Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Azure Communication Services. The IC3 Platform team builds shared infrastructure and engineering capabilities that help these services deploy and operate reliably across global and sovereign clouds.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for our Buildout Efficiency initiative. Our goal is to make expanding services into new clouds, geographic regions, and deployment environments a repeatable, self-service process rather than a sequence of manual handoffs.

This role will lead the architecture and development of an infrastructure orchestration platform that turns declarative service definitions into deployment pipelines and coordinated provisioning workflows. The work spans compute, networking, identity, certificates, monitoring, and capacity dependencies, with explicit approval, validation, and recovery controls.

You will write and review production code, define integration contracts, and work with Azure and Microsoft 365 partners to close gaps across the full buildout process. You will also apply AI agents to engineering and provisioning workflows while maintaining human review, automated testing, security, and operational accountability. Success means fewer manual interventions, shorter buildout times, and reliable recovery when dependencies fail.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and hands-on development of a self-service infrastructure buildout platform, from declarative service definitions through provisioning, deployment, and validation.

• Design distributed workflows with clear dependency ordering, approval gates, durable state tracking, safe retries, and recovery from partial failures.

• Write and review secure, maintainable production code; establish automated testing, integration testing, and safe deployment practices.

• Partner with service teams, Azure, and Microsoft 365 engineering teams to define requirements, ownership boundaries, readiness signals, and completion criteria.

• Develop and apply AI-assisted engineering workflows, including coding agents and automated pull requests, with human review, evaluation, and Responsible AI controls.

• Build security, privacy, compliance, accessibility, and auditability into the platform; preserve required authorization and capacity approvals as automation expands.

• Own operational reliability through telemetry, on-call participation, incident response, and continuous improvement. Measure buildout duration, manual interventions, success rates, and recovery time.

• Mentor engineers, lead cross-team design reviews, and translate the technical strategy into deliverable milestones informed by service-team feedback.

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#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.

Additional Required Qualifications:

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:

• Masters Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• Experience architecting, developing, and operating large-scale distributed systems on Microsoft Azure or similar cloud platforms.

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and automated deployment pipelines.

• Familiarity with Microsoft Ev2 or comparable large-scale deployment orchestration systems.

• Experience designing infrastructure orchestration with dependency management, safe deployment practices, and recovery from partial failures.

• Demonstrated success reducing manual engineering effort through reusable tooling and self-service platform capabilities.

• Experience with AI-assisted development and coding agents, supported by rigorous code review, automated testing, and security controls.

• Demonstrated technical leadership across teams, including architectural decision-making, mentoring, and communicating engineering trade-offs.

#IC3Platform

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.