Responsibilities
Principal Software Engineer - Responsibilities Technical leadership & architecture
• Own the technical direction and architecture for one or more critical services, driving designs that are secure, scalable, and reliable at Microsoft scale.
• Lead complex, cross-team system design efforts spanning identity, policy evaluation, and secure access enforcement; make and document high-impact architectural decisions and trade-offs.
• Set and raise engineering standards for code quality, testing, performance, and operational excellence across the team. Delivery & execution
• Break down ambiguous, large-scale problems into actionable technical roadmaps and drive them to delivery across multiple engineers and teams.
• Personally deliver on the hardest, highest-risk parts of the work, and unblock others when execution stalls.
• Drive engineering rigor in security, privacy, compliance, and Zero Trust principles throughout the development lifecycle. Reliability & operational excellence
• Champion live-site health, security posture, and operational readiness; lead incident response and drive systemic fixes for the toughest issues.
• Define SLAs/SLOs and instrument services for observability, resilience, and rapid recovery. Influence & cross-org impact
• Partner with PM, partner engineering teams, and leadership to shape product and platform strategy beyond team boundaries.
• Represent the team in cross-org technical forums, architecture reviews, and standards bodies; align stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• Drive alignment on shared platforms and reduce duplication across adjacent teams. People & culture
• Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers, raising the technical bar and building the next generation of technical leaders.
• Provide deep, constructive technical review (designs, code, incident postmortems) that elevates the whole team.
• Model an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture and strong customer obsession.
Other
Embody our Culture and Values
Qualifications
Required/minimum 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.
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:
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field AND 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems, cloud services, or high-availability production services.
• 3+ years of experience leading the technical direction and architecture of complex, cross-team engineering efforts. Preferred/Additional Qualifications
• Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field AND 10+ years of technical engineering experience.
• Deep experience in identity, authentication/authorization, security, or Zero Trust architectures (e.g., Microsoft Entra, Conditional Access, Global Secure Access, OAuth/OIDC, SAML).
• Proven track record designing and operating mission-critical, low-latency services in the request hot path at internet scale (billions of transactions/day).
• Strong background in distributed systems fundamentals - consistency, resilience, high availability, and graceful degradation.
• Experience owning live-site health and operational excellence, including on-call leadership, incident response, and driving systemic reliability improvements.
• Hands-on experience with a major public cloud (Azure preferred) and modern service technologies (containers, microservices, CI/CD).
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and orgs, and to mentor and grow senior engineers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience representing engineering in cross-org architecture and strategy forums.
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.
