Principal Software Engineer, AI Ads

Principal Software Engineer – AI Ads | Microsoft AI

Role Overview

Microsoft AI is hiring a Principal Software Engineer (IC5) to build the next generation of AI-powered advertising, shopping, and travel systems. The role focuses on creating large-scale, low-latency platforms that power experiences across Bing Search Ads, Copilot, shopping, travel, product insights, personalization, and AI agents.

The engineer will define technical strategy while remaining hands-on, building globally distributed systems using AI, large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and distributed computing technologies.

Key Responsibilities

AI Advertising & Infrastructure

• Lead the architecture, development, and optimization of:

• Shopping advertising systems.

• Travel infrastructure.

• Product knowledge graphs.

• AI-driven commerce platforms.

• Build scalable, reliable, low-latency systems serving billions of products and travel offerings.

• Transform AI research and prototypes into production-ready systems.

AI-Native Engineering

• Advance Microsoft’s AI-assisted development practices through:

• Coding agents.

• Agentic workflows.

• AI-powered software development.

• Harness engineering.

• Improve developer productivity and engineering processes using emerging AI technologies.

Technical Leadership

• Make major architectural decisions across teams.

• Lead complex cross-organization engineering initiatives.

• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards.

• Collaborate with:

• AI researchers.

• Software engineers.

• Data scientists.

• Product managers.

Technical Areas

The role involves:

• Artificial Intelligence & Generative AI.
• Large Language Models (LLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs).
• Distributed systems.
• Information retrieval.
• Real-time streaming systems.
• Big data infrastructure.
• Computational advertising.
• Search engines.
• Recommendation systems.
• Product and knowledge graphs.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience.

• Strong programming experience in:

• C / C++

• C#

• Java

• JavaScript

• Python

• Ability to pass Microsoft security and cloud background checks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree + 8 years experience, or Bachelor’s + 12 years equivalent experience.

• Experience building:

• Massive-scale distributed systems.

• Global production platforms.

• Big data infrastructure.

• AI systems.

• Expertise in areas such as:

• Online advertising.

• Search technology.

• Recommendation systems.

• Real-time streaming (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming).

• AI infrastructure.

• Experience with product/knowledge graphs:

• Entity resolution.

• Taxonomies.

• Attribute extraction.

• Indexing.

• Low-latency retrieval.

• Experience with technologies such as:

• Azure.

• Kubernetes.

• Docker.

• SQL.

• NoSQL databases.

• Kusto.

• Airflow.

• Presto.

• AI model inference platforms.

• Strong leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Role Details

• Company: Microsoft
• Team: Microsoft AI – Shopping Ads & Travel Infrastructure
• Position: Principal Software Engineer (IC5)
• Location: Mountain View, California
• Work Style: Hybrid (4 days/week in office)
• Travel: Less than 25%
• Employment: Full-time

Compensation (U.S.)

• Base salary range: $142,800 – $274,800/year
• San Francisco Bay Area & New York City: $188,000 – $304,200/year
• Additional benefits and compensation may apply.

Ideal Candidate Profile

A senior AI-focused software engineer who can design and operate global-scale intelligent systems. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in distributed systems, machine learning infrastructure, search/advertising technology, and AI-native development while being capable of leading major technical initiatives across Microsoft.