OverviewMicrosoft Substrate is the foundational cloud platform that powers many of Microsoft's most critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot, providing shared infrastructure, identity, messaging, storage, and service-to-service capabilities used across Microsoft 365 and related cloud offerings. Substrate services operate at global scale and are designed to deliver high availability, reliability, and security for some of the world's most demanding workloads.
As a
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will lead reliability improvements across multiple services or components, solving complex, cross-cutting operational problems. You are recognized as a subject matter expert in your area and lead by example through strong technical judgment, ownership, and accountability.
You will influence service architecture, define reliability strategies, mentor other SREs, and drive meaningful reductions in incidents, toil, and operational risk-particularly for services operating in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.
Responsibilities- Lead reliability and availability improvements across multiple Substrate services in highly regulated environments.
- Serve as a senior on-call engineer (OCE), leading incident response for complex or high-severity incidents in regulated environments.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership during incidents, coordinating response across teams as needed.
- Drive high-quality post-incident reviews that identify systemic issues and result in durable engineering improvements.
- Drive automation, monitoring, and observability strategies to reduce incident volume and mean time to recovery.
- Lead design and implementation of reliability-focused software components, frameworks, or platforms used across multiple services.
- Partner with engineering teams to influence service architecture and operational readiness.
- Mentor and coach junior SREs, establishing best practices and raising the team's technical bar.
- Represent SRE perspectives in design reviews, planning forums, and cross-team initiatives.
QualificationsRequired Qualifications:- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience.
Other Requirements: Security Clearance RequirementsCandidates must be able to meet
Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings:
This role requires access to
Microsoft Government cloud environments, including
GCC Moderate (GCCM), GCC High (GCCH), and Department of Defense (DoD) environments. As a result, the successful candidate must be able to
obtain and maintain the appropriate background investigations and customer screenings required for access to these environments.
- For access to GCCH and DoD environments, this role requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorably adjudicated Tier 3 (T3) background investigation.
- For access to GCCM environments, this role requires the ability to meet Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) eligibility requirements.
For
manager-level roles, a
Tier 5 (T5) background investigation is preferred, as certain approval authorities and operational responsibilities require this level of screening.
Candidates
may be considered without currently holding these background investigations, provided they are
eligible for and able to successfully obtain them. Candidates may begin work while required background investigations are in progress; however,
failure to obtain or maintain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
In addition, this position will be required to
pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred Qualifications:- Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
- OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
Site Reliability 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.
