Senior Firmware Engineer

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsofts over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and deliver trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate engineers to help achieve that mission. 

To achieve this goal, we in the Hardware Health Service team within Azure are responsible for the design, implementation, and operation of global scalable cloud services to monitor the fleet’s hardware health and predict anomalies and pending failures.  We focus on delivering the solutions required for our cloud service platforms at the lowest possible cost of ownership (TCO) and providing great customer experience on unreliable hardware. 

Azure Hardware Health Service is looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer to be a part of the fast-paced and exciting business of Azure. This is your chance to be part of the most exciting end-to-end teams within Microsoft.  We are looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer with experience in cloud service development to come help us develop and light up innovative hardware solutions that powers Azure and make our world-class cloud infrastructure even better. 

Responsibilities

• Develop and operate large scale, low latency, and high throughput systems. 
• Debug in data center (onsite and virtual).
• Evaluates AI technologies (such as LLMs, SLMs, embeddings) and architectures (such as orchestration patterns, RAG, etc) when developing solutions targeting firmware/hardware improvement.
• Specifies or implements AI platform improvements like fine-tuning or training custom ML models.
• Experience in working with the modern server architectures – includes understanding of GPU, GPU system hardware, Memory or CPU and methods for failure analysis, debugging or validation.
• Drive the continuous improvement process based on Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and identified opportunities.
• Contributes to data analysis and feedback integration for product engineering decisions, acting as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) for monitoring and restoring system functionality within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe.
• Participates in live service operations, and supports telemetry data integration for system behavior insights, with a focus on performance, reliability, and safety.
• You will help coordinate, integrate, validate and debug system software comprising of different domains within server architecture (such as SoC FWs, BIOS, BMC etc.).
• Supports the identification of dependencies and design documentation for product features, learns about system interactions and back-end dependencies, and contributes to architectural processes under guidance.
• Produces code to test hypotheses for technical solutions and assist with technical validation efforts.
• Collaborates on quality assurance plans, augments test cases, and integrates automation into testing, while understanding the implications of security and compliance in system architecture.
• Ensures compliance with security, privacy, safety, and accessibility standards, leverages developer tools for code creation and debugging, contributes to automation in production and deployment, and proactively seeks knowledge to improve product availability, reliability, efficiency, and performance at scale.  

Qualifications

Required Qualifications 

• Doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 1+ year(s) technical engineering experience OR Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years technical engineering experience 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: 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: 

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 1+ year(s) technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. OR Masters Degree (or currently pursuing a degree) in Computer Science or related technical field with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python. 
• Background in firmware/software development, testing strategies, and requirements definition. 
• Familiarity with end-to-end CPU/SoC product development processes. 
• Experience with data center hardware/software projects, from concept through deployment. 
• Over 7+ years of experience in software development using one or more programming languages such as C, C++, C#, Python, etc.

Firmware 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.