Principal Firmware Development Engineer

Principal Firmware Development Engineer

United States, Washington, Redmond

+4 more

Job description

Company and benefits

Job number

200062483

Date posted

Oct 23, 2026

Work site

3 days / week in-office

Travel

Less than 25%

Profession

Hardware Engineering

Discipline

Firmware Engineering

Role type

Individual Contributor

Employment type

Full-Time

Overview

Microsoft Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering SCHIE is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions.

Join Microsoft Azure s Firmware Center of Excellence to define the future of pre-silicon software development for Microsoft custom silicon. This Principal Modeling Architect is a cross-program technical leader who solves hard system-level problems, establishes scalable architecture and engineering patterns, and then transitions execution ownership to development teams and other engineers for long-term delivery.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership and Strategy

• Lead resolution of complex system-level challenges spanning virtual platforms, firmware, silicon architecture, validation infrastructure, software enablement, and hybrid execution environments.

• Define architectural direction for SystemC/TLM-based virtual platforms supporting multiple generations of Azure silicon.

• Identify technical risks, technology gaps, and scaling challenges across programs, then drive practical solutions that can be adopted by multiple teams.

• Establish engineering standards, modeling practices, reusable frameworks, debug strategies, and validation approaches that improve quality and reduce duplicated effort.

• Cross-Program Architecture and Influence

• Work across multiple silicon programs as a shared technical leader and subject matter expert.

• Define reusable platform capabilities across Azure hardware initiatives rather than creating one-off project-specific implementations.

• Influence silicon architecture, firmware readiness, validation methodologies, and platform bring-up strategy through early technical engagement.

• Drive alignment across architecture, design verification, firmware, operating system, emulation, prototyping, and platform teams without relying on direct authority.

• Modeling and Firmware Enablement

• Design and develop SystemC/TLM-2.0 models for complex SoC subsystems including PCIe, memory, boot infrastructure, compute clusters, interconnect, and platform services.

• Develop and debug low-level firmware and validation software running on virtual platforms.

• Support firmware bring-up activities including UEFI, Windows Boot, PCIe initialization, platform enumeration, early driver enablement, and operating system integration.

• Debug complex interactions spanning hardware, firmware, operating systems, virtualization environments, simulation infrastructure, host systems, and modeling frameworks.

• Analyze and optimize simulation performance, scalability, usability, and debug productivity across large SoC and multi-SoC environments.

• Hybrid Platform Strategy

• Contribute to architectural integration of virtual platforms with emulation and prototyping systems including ZeBu, HAPS