Microsoft

Software Engineer II

Microsoft$102K — $202K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field and 2+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
  • Hands-on experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants.
  • Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns and multi-step reasoning.
  • Experience dogfooding and evaluating emerging AI developer tools.
  • Proven experience delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.

Responsibilities

  • Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle.
  • Use AI in daily coding and advocate best practices to the team.
  • Demonstrate resiliency to experiment with multiple AI approaches.
  • Provide mentorship and coaching to fellow engineers.
  • Write and review high-quality, clean code emphasizing scalability and maintainability.

Benefits

  • Flexible working environment promoting work-life balance.
  • Opportunities for continuous learning and skill development.
  • Engagement with cutting-edge AI technology and tools.
  • Participation in a collaborative team culture that values diverse perspectives.
Full Job Description
Overview

Are you a Software Engineer already at the forefront of agentic AI development - someone who uses agents to build software today and wants to build the platform that brings those capabilities to every developer at Microsoft? Do you have strong opinions about what great agentic tooling looks like, formed from real experience shipping with it? Do you want to dogfood the very platform you're building and have your own productivity transformed by it? If so, we'd love to talk with you about this opportunity!

Our AI team is a part of the larger ES365 (Microsoft 365 Engineering Systems) team - and we own the agentic engineering platform being adopted across all of Microsoft. ES365 owns the tools and systems used by thousands of Microsoft developers who innovate across the company's largest codebases, from source control and check-in experience to build, validation, and deployment automation. This gives us a unique position to define what AI-powered developer productivity looks like at Microsoft scale.

The ES365 AI team is 100% focused on pushing that frontier. We build the agentic platform itself and the experiences on top of it. The developers and codebase owners who use these tools are your customers, just down the hall - giving us a tight feedback loop and the domain expertise to move fast. For additional context, example workstreams have included AI-assisted large-scale codebase refactoring, automated package integrations, deep architectural Q&A over codebases, and human-in-the-loop directed code changes.

We're a looking for a Software Engineer II. In this role, you'll help define and build the next generation of our agentic platform, orchestrating the latest AI models and harnesses in service of company-wide developer productivity. You'll lead through excellent contributions to the ESAI codebase, advocate best practices for agentic development, and forge technical and mission-based partnerships with other teams across Microsoft working on related problems.

If you are excited about AI's potential and want to be on the front lines of AI-Powered developer efficiency at Microsoft, we want you in ES365 AI.

Responsibilities
  • Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle, including design, architecture, implementation, testability, debugging, shipping, and servicing.
  • Use AI in your daily coding and advocate to the team and customers an evolving state-of-the-art of how best to do this.
  • Demonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work - because no one has tried them before.
  • Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers in, and beyond, your team.
  • Write and review clean, well-thought-out code with an emphasis on quality, performance, simplicity, durability, scalability, and maintainability.
  • Contribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.


Qualifications

Required Qualifications:
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ 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:
  • Hands-on experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as:
  • GitHub Copilot and Copilot Workspace - AI pair programming, CLI, and task-oriented development
  • Claude Code - agentic CLI for autonomous software engineering tasks
  • OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT - LLM-based code generation and explanation
  • Cursor - AI-native code editor with inline generation and multi-file edits
  • Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
  • Prior experience building with Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar).
  • Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns - multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
  • Experience dogfooding, evaluating, and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translating those insights into team-wide best practices.
  • Background in developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or engineering systems at scale.
  • Proven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.
  • Solid software engineering fundamentals: system design, algorithms, testing, debugging, and code review.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.
  • Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.

#CAP #CTO #CAPHiring

Software Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $102,100 - $202,200 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 $133,800 - $219,200 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
NASDAQ

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