Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help define the future of hardware strategy and performance architecture across Microsoft 365. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, AI workloads, hardware platform evolution, and software performance engineering. The position involves collaborating with engineering, infrastructure, and platform teams to ensure Microsoft 365 leverages emerging hardware capabilities while delivering industry-leading performance, efficiency, and scale.

Responsibilities

• Drive hardware strategy and hardware-software co-design for Microsoft 365, Copilot, Agents, PAC, and Substrate workloads.
• Define benchmarking, workload characterization, and performance evaluation frameworks to influence platform and infrastructure decisions across compute, GPU, memory, storage, networking, and accelerator technologies.
• Lead deep technical investigations into performance, efficiency, and scalability challenges across large-scale distributed systems and AI-powered services.
• Partner with Azure, infrastructure, and platform engineering teams to evaluate emerging hardware technologies and translate platform capabilities into meaningful customer and business impact.
• Build the next generation of AI-assisted performance engineering capabilities, enabling faster analysis, diagnosis, optimization, and decision-making across Microsoft 365 services.
• Provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries, influencing architecture, platform direction, and engineering practices at Microsoft 365 scale.

Requirements

• Required: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check (to be completed on hire/transfer and every two years thereafter).

Preferred qualifications (summarized):

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related field with 12+ years of experience, or Bachelor’s with 15+ years of experience, in programming languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Proven track record leading performance, systems, infrastructure, or hardware strategy initiatives for large-scale cloud services.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, computer architecture, performance engineering, benchmarking, and workload analysis.
• Experience using data, experimentation, and technical analysis to influence platform, architecture, or infrastructure investments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-organizational technical efforts and influence senior engineering leaders.
• Experience applying AI to engineering workflows, performance analysis, diagnostics, optimization, or operational decision-making.
• Experience with AI infrastructure, large-scale inference workloads, retrieval systems, agent platforms, or Copilot-style architectures.
• Experience evaluating emerging hardware platforms and translating hardware capabilities into product and platform advantages.
• Experience building AI-assisted engineering systems for diagnostics, performance analysis, optimization, or operational intelligence.