Microsoft

Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft$119K — $234K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field and 4+ years of technical engineering experience, OR equivalent experience.
  • Proficiency in programming languages such as C, C++, Go or Python.
  • Ability to meet Microsoft security screening requirements.
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field and 6+ years of experience, OR Bachelor's Degree and 8+ years of experience preferred.
  • Experience contributing to Chromium or open-source projects using Ninja-based build systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Utilize AI tools and practices throughout the software development lifecycle with minimal guidance.
  • Proactively verify code quality through debugging, testing, and incident retrospectives.
  • Review code for quality assurance and coach fellow engineers to enhance their skills.
  • Provide architectural feedback and contribute to design documents with minimal supervision.
  • Create and execute test strategies that ensure solution quality and prevent regression.
  • Identify dependencies and collaborate effectively with other teams.
  • Contribute to automation development for production environments with a focus on zero-touch deployment.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health and wellness plans.
  • Accrued vacation and paid time off.
  • Retirement savings plan with company match.
  • Opportunities for professional development and training.
  • Options for flexible work arrangements.
Full Job Description
Overview

The Edge browser is a strategic product and a key entry point to Microsoft's new AI ecosystem serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

The Edge Engineering System team is looking for exceptional engineers to help us streamline our engineering workflows and enable our development team to develop high-quality code at light speed. We build modern, AI-first engineering workflows and ensure that our releases are regular, timely, and automatic.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities
  • AI-Native Development
    • Uses appropriate artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in a disciplined manner. Takes responsibility for the content of their AI-generated changes to artifacts, reviewing all changes and applying appropriate tooling and processes with minimal guidance.
  • Coding
    • Uses debugging, tests, tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods to proactively verify assumptions before issues occur for product features in production. Conducts incident retrospectives and identifies root causes of problems, implements repair actions, and identifies mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence with minimal supervision. Under minimal guidance, applies least-access principles, and uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security.
    • Reviews product feature code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product feature. Brings insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills with minimal guidance. Reviews code in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team. Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews.
  • Design
    • Understands and provides feedback for proposals for architecture, with technical leadership from others. With minimal supervision, tests and explores various design options for a product/solution feature, outlining strengths and weaknesses of each option. Owns or collaborates with other engineers on the architecture of solutions, following technical leadership as applicable. Contributes to the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements with oversight. Develops an awareness of the current technology landscape. Escalates and shares findings from investigations with the team and owns some design decisions. Helps to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Contributes to the refinement of product features by escalating findings from analyses to inform decisions regarding the engineering of products.
    • Creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code with minimal supervision. Executes test plans that incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases) with minimal supervision. Adds new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of tests in the feature area. Builds testable code and considers testability during design for a set of features with minimal guidance. Understands the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry.
    • Identifies dependencies and incorporates them into the development of design documents for a product area with little oversight. Actively identifies other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Understands downstream interactions between systems. Contributes to collaborating with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap.
  • Engineering Excellence
    • Contributes to the identification of requirements for, and development of automation within production and deployment of a complex product feature, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Runs code in simulated, or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime for products with little to no oversight.
    • Applies best practices to build code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Follows best practices for product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.
    • Ensures the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility. Checks for visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for product areas. Develops and holds an understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are met.
  • Implement
    • Reviews work items to deepen knowledge of product features in partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) and executes project plans, release plans, and work items. Contributes to efforts to break down larger work items into smaller work items and providing estimation. Escalates issues that might cause a delay. Ensures required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning with minimal guidance. Contributes to ensuring project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Ensures all code for a set of product/solution features is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents with minimal supervision. Calculates capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of features with minimal guidance. Makes considerations for efficient operation of a set of features after it is live with minimal supervision. Contributes to establishing a rollback plan for a set of features.
    • Learns about and supports deployment to customers by following the correct measures to push features out to customers. Follows safe change deployment practices (e.g., ensuring that flights are set correctly) for their team to minimize adverse impact to users and other services with managerial guidance. Learns about and applies best practices for the deployment of features safely with managerial oversight and/or guidance from more experienced peers. Contributes to monitoring dependency status and ensuring that only the latest, secure versions are deployed. Identifies when rollback plans should be enacted for a product feature with direct supervision. Contributes to building deployment infrastructure to allow developers' private builds for a product feature to be tested in a production-like environment.
    • Leveraging internal experimentation infrastructures, conducts experiments that determine the impact of changes, using feature flags/flighting in their code. Collaborates with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to incorporate success and guard rail metrics for experimentation with minimal guidance.
  • Reliability and Supportability
    • Maintains operations of live site service, following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Identifies solutions and mitigations to simple issues and complex issues when applicable impacting performance or functionality of live site services and escalates appropriately. With minimal supervision, improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests, and telemetry to make on-call better, and recommends user-facing support documentation and additional test coverage to reduce likelihood of future user-initiated incidents. Contributes to enabling secure operations, security monitoring, and integration with live site investigation activities with minimal oversight. Identifies and proposes opportunities (e.g., lunch talks, automation, practices, tools) that can be leveraged to improve the live site experience with minimal guidance.
    • Identifies areas to contribute to efforts to integrate logging and instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms, and for allowing monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios for both live and A/B experiments for products, services, and offerings. Leverages telemetry feedback and effectiveness to contribute to improving subsequent monitoring designs with minimal guidance. Contributes to efforts to classify and analyze data with little oversight on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring), and helps to create outputs (e.g., notifications, dashboards) that improve monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios, system monitoring and/or issue identification and mitigation. Considers the privacy implications of telemetry code changes and adding new data points with minimal guidance.
    • Acts as a designated responsible individual (DRI), working on-call to monitor a system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to the status and gains approval to restore system/product/service for simple problems. Responds within service level agreement (SLA) timeframe. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.
  • Understand User Requirements
    • Works with appropriate internal stakeholders (e.g., product manager, privacy/security subject matter expert, technical lead) to understand and determine customer/user requirements for a set of features. Incorporates customer insights into future designs or solution fixes with minimal supervision. Incorporates unwritten requirements, such as appropriate continuous feedback loops that measure actionable, quantitative (e.g., customer value, usage patterns, solution performance) and qualitative (e.g., accessibility, globalization) indicators of value. Understands, and begins providing feedback on, and advocating for the security and privacy needs of the customer who will be using the set of features.


Qualifications

Required Qualifications:
  • Bachelor's 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++, Go 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:
  • Master'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++, Go or Python
    • OR Bachelor'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++, Go or Python
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • 2+ years of experience contributing to Chromium and/or open-source projects built using Ninja-based build systems.

#MicrosoftAI

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.

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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