Principal Software Engineer

Overview

As AI becomes more capable, the future of content discovery will be powered by recommendation systems, AI agents, and generative AI working together to deliver personalized, useful, and engaging experiences.

The Intelligent Discovery Platform team at Microsoft Feeds & AI builds the core platforms behind Copilot Discover. Our mission is to enable product teams to rapidly build, train, deploy, and scale intelligent discovery experiences that serve millions of users.

Our work spans four key platform areas:

• Recommendation Platform - Powers the end-to-end recommendation stack, including retrieval, ranking, reranking, experimentation, online serving, and evaluation.
• Agent Platform - Provides the foundation for AI agents, including workflow orchestration, tool integration, memory, context management, and scalable agent execution.
• Generative Content Platform - Builds foundational services and end-to-end systems that power rich multimodal generative experiences, spanning retrieval, grounding, large-scale content generation, and synthesis.
• Machine Learning (ML) Platform - Supports the full model lifecycle, including large-scale model training, GPU and inference optimization, model deployment, observability, and reliable production operations.

Across these platforms, we build scalable distributed systems, AI-native developer experiences, and production-ready services that help bring new AI capabilities from ideas to production quickly, efficiently, and reliably.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to build the platforms powering the next generation of intelligent discovery for millions of users. If this opportunity excites you, wed love to hear from you.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for one or more complex scenarios.
• Provides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company. - Leverages deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple products project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.

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.

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.

• 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed backend services.

• 1+ year of experience with AI-native development and coding practices.

• 5+ years of experience as a technical lead, including mentoring and providing technical guidance to engineers.

• Experience with recommendation platforms, model training infrastructure, or agent platforms is a plus.

#MicrosoftAI

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.