Microsoft

Principal Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Microsoft • $142K — $274K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 6+ years of coding experience in languages like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 8+ years of coding experience OR Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years of coding experience
  • Experience with AI/ML serving platforms and compute-intensive distributed systems
  • Familiarity with distributed tracing, capacity management, and load balancing
  • Proficiency in Azure Monitoring systems is a plus
  • Experience in reliability engineering and production incident response
  • Strong communication skills for technical strategy and architectural discussions

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive the architecture for platform reliability and observability
  • Design health and telemetry capabilities linking customer impact with application signals
  • Develop safeguards for overload protection and capacity management
  • Establish engineering practices for production validation and automated rollback
  • Advance end-to-end request tracing and diagnostics across services
  • Lead cross-team architecture efforts and mentor engineers
  • Transform production learnings into reusable capabilities and reliability improvements

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance
  • Retirement savings plans
  • Paid time off and holidays
  • Professional development opportunities
  • Flexible work arrangements
Full Job Description
Overview

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to advance the reliability and observability architecture of a large-scale, globally distributed AI platform. You will set technical direction and solve complex challenges across runtime, routing, capacity, infrastructure, and specialized hardware.

This role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI inference. You will learn how advanced AI models are deployed and operated globally, collaborate with experts across the stack, and build foundational capabilities that directly improve customer experience.

This is an ideal role for a technical leader who enjoys solving ambiguous, cross-system problems, mentoring engineers, and shaping engineering practices across an organization.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities
  • Define and drive the architecture and technical roadmap for platform reliability, observability, and operational health.
  • Design unified health and telemetry capabilities that connect customer impact with application, capacity, dependency, infrastructure, and deployment signals.
  • Develop platform safeguards for overload protection, capacity management, routing integrity, configuration consistency, and automated isolation and recovery.
  • Establish engineering practices for production validation, progressive delivery, regression detection, fault testing, and automated rollback.
  • Advance end-to-end request tracing and diagnostics across distributed services, including routing, retries, failover, and asynchronous operations.
  • Lead cross-team architecture efforts, mentor engineers, and turn production learnings into reusable platform capabilities and measurable reliability improvements.


Qualifications

Required Qualifications:
  • Bachelor's 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:
  • Master's 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 Bachelor's 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 with AI/ML serving platforms, high-performance computing, accelerator-based infrastructure or other compute-intensive distributed systems.
  • Experience with distributed tracing, capacity management, load balancing, admission control, retries, backpressure, and graceful degradation.
  • Proficiency in Azure Monitoring systems in the Azure ecosystem would be a plus.
  • Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud services, or other complex production platforms.
  • Experience with reliability engineering, observability, service health, telemetry, and production incident response.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives and drive alignment across engineering teams and organizational boundaries.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical strategy and architectural decisions to engineers and senior leaders.


#AIINFRA

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.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Learn more about Microsoft
Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
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