About this role
Principal Hardware Engineer
United States, California, San Diego
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Job description
Company and benefits
Job number
200064636
Date posted
Oct 30, 2026
Work site
3 days / week in-office
Travel
Less than 25%
Profession
Hardware Engineering
Discipline
Hardware Engineering
Role type
Individual Contributor
Employment type
Full-Time
Overview
Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and 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, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for engineers to help achieve that mission.
The Azure Memory & Storage (AMS) Commodity Quality and Validation Engineering (CQVE) team is responsible for ensuring storage device quality, reliability, and compliance before deployment at Azure scale.
We are seeking a Lead Engineer to drive the Certified Device List (CDL) qualification program for hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), and PCIe switches. This role will lead qualification and validation strategy, develop and enhance test suites, translate industry and Microsoft requirements into comprehensive test procedures, partner closely with suppliers, and drive continuous quality improvements based on fleet learnings.
The successful candidate will play a key role in delivering high-quality, reliable, and secure storage and PCIe solutions that meet Azure performance, compatibility, and reliability requirements while preventing validation escapes and fleet-impacting issues.
Responsibilities
- Translate Microsoft, OCP, security, reliability, and platform requirements into comprehensive HDD, SSD, and PCIe Switch validation strategies, test plans, and qualification procedures.
- Design, develop, automate, and maintain CDL test suites covering functionality, performance, reliability, error handling, recovery, power, security, interoperability, and fleet-specific scenarios.
- Analyze fleet learnings, field incidents, and validation escapes to identify coverage gaps, reproduce failures in the lab, and continuously improve validation methodologies and test coverage.
- Partner with HDD, SSD, and PCIe Switch suppliers to review qualification results, debug failures, drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions, and ensure compliance with Microsoft quality and certification requirements.
- Validate storage and PCIe solutions across component, subsystem, and platform levels, including firmware, driver, hardware, and system interactions.
- Lead cross-functional technical discussions with storage architecture, platform, firmware, driver, reliability, and datacenter engineering teams to resolve complex storage and PCIe issues.
- Drive qualification readiness for next-generation HDD, SSD, NVMe, and PCIe Switch technologies, ensuring solutions meet Azure reliability, performance, security, compatibility, and serviceability requirements.
- Influence validation standards and supplier methodologies, while mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership in storage and PCIe validation.
Qualifications
- Required/m