Principal Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Principal Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

United States, Washington, Redmond

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Job description

Company and benefits

Job number

200058563

Date posted

Oct 05, 2026

Work site

3 days / week in-office

Travel

Less than 25%

Profession

Software Engineering

Discipline

Software Engineering

Role type

Individual Contributor

Employment type

Full-Time

Overview

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to advance the reliability and observability architecture of a large-scale, globally distributed AI platform. You will set technical direction and solve complex challenges across runtime, routing, capacity, infrastructure, and specialized hardware.

This role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI inference. You will learn how advanced AI models are deployed and operated globally, collaborate with experts across the stack, and build foundational capabilities that directly improve customer experience.

This is an ideal role for a technical leader who enjoys solving ambiguous, cross-system problems, mentoring engineers, and shaping engineering practices across an organization.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day, we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architecture and technical roadmap for platform reliability, observability, and operational health.
• Design unified health and telemetry capabilities that connect customer impact with application, capacity, dependency, infrastructure, and deployment signals.
• Develop platform safeguards for overload protection, capacity management, routing integrity, configuration consistency, and automated isolation and recovery.
• Establish engineering practices for production validation, progressive delivery, regression detection, fault testing, and automated rollback.
• Advance end-to-end request tracing and diagnostics across distributed services, including routing, retries, failover, and asynchronous operations.
• Lead cross-team architecture efforts, mentor engineers, and turn production learnings into reusable platform capabilities and measurable reliability improvements.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• -
• Bachelor'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++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master'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++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
• AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.
• Experience with AI/ML serving platforms, high-performance computing, accelerator-based infrastructure or other compute-intensive distributed systems.
• Experience with distributed tracing, capacity management, load balancing, admission control, retries, backpressure, and graceful degr