Senior Software Engineer - CTJ - TS/SCI

Overview

Do you want to help operate and evolve the control plane at the heart of Microsoft Azure? The One Plane team delivers the services that form Azure's management layer, through which customers deploy, configure, and govern their resources. Central to this portfolio is Azure Resource Manager (ARM), the control-plane service underlying resource management across Azure.

Our team brings these critical services to customers operating mission-critical workloads in highly secure and regulated environments. We are responsible for deploying, operating, and improving ARM and its adjacent services across specialized clouds while maintaining alignment with the broader Azure platform.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who is energized by technically challenging problems and comfortable working across service and organizational boundaries. In this role, you will investigate complex distributed-system behavior, lead substantial engineering efforts, improve how services are delivered and operated, and help other engineers strengthen their design, debugging, and coding skills. You will partner closely with engineers across Azure to turn the needs of highly regulated clouds into durable improvements for our customers and the broader platform.

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

• Take end-to-end ownership of substantial engineering efforts across Azure control-plane services, from initial investigation and technical design through implementation, deployment, and production operation. Partner with Azure engineering teams to deliver service updates that meet the requirements of specialized clouds.
• Investigate and resolve complex issues spanning distributed services, deployment systems, infrastructure, and environmental dependencies. Use source code, telemetry, logs, and service architecture to identify root causes and drive durable corrective actions.
• Identify assumptions and dependencies that limit where Azure services can operate. Design and influence improvements that make services more portable, environment-agnostic, reliable, and maintainable across commercial and specialized clouds.
• Act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and participate in on-call rotations for mission-critical services. Diagnose service degradation and outages, communicate status to stakeholders, restore service within established objectives, and ensure incidents result in meaningful engineering improvements.
• Improve service delivery through automation, deployment safety, observability, performance optimization, and the elimination of repetitive operational work. Use production experience and service data to prioritize improvements with measurable impact.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, design discussions, debugging guidance, and hands-on collaboration. Mentor other engineers and help strengthen their coding, debugging, design, and engineering decision-making skills.
• Proactively evaluate new technologies, tools, and engineering practices that can improve developer productivity, service quality, and operational effectiveness. Apply sound technical judgment to determine where they provide meaningful value while meeting security, compliance, reliability, and operational requirements.
• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able 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:

• Candidates must have an active TS/SCI and be willing and eligible to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph). This role will require candidates to maintain the TS/SCI (with polygraph) clearance. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required pre-offer and post-hire for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
• Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, debugging, or operating production services.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex software and distributed-system failures using source code, logs, telemetry, debuggers, and other diagnostic tools.
• Experience reading, reviewing, and modifying unfamiliar codebases and tracing behavior across services and system layers.
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including asynchronous processing, concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Experience taking substantial or ambiguous engineering projects from initial investigation and design through implementation, deployment, and production operation.
• Experience developing and debugging software using C#, Java, or another object-oriented programming language.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across teams and help other engineers improve their code quality, debugging practices, system designs, and engineering judgment.

Software 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.

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.