About this role
Principal Software Engineer - Microsoft Substrate Data Plane team
United States, Washington, Redmond
Job description
Company and benefits
Job number 200047387
Date posted Oct 21, 2026
Work site 3 days / week in-office
Travel Less than 25%
Profession Software Engineering
Discipline Software Engineering
Role type Independent Contributor
Employment type Full-Time
Overview
The Microsoft Substrate Data Plane team powers the foundational services that enable Microsoft 365 experiences at planetary scale. Our platform processes and serves billions of signals, messages, documents, and interactions across Exchange, Teams, Copilot, and emerging AI-powered experiences. We build highly available, low-latency, massively distributed services that form the backbone of Microsoft's productivity cloud.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the next generation of intelligent data services and agent-enabled platforms. In this role, you will lead the architecture, development, and operation of large-scale distributed systems that support Copilot, AI agents, search, retrieval, indexing, and data processing workloads across Microsoft 365.
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
- Design, build, and operate large-scale, highly available cloud services that power Microsoft 365 experiences for billions of requests and millions of users worldwide.
- Drive architecture, development, and delivery of distributed systems focused on scalability, reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Develop platform capabilities that enable AI-powered experiences, including agent orchestration, tool execution, data access, grounding, and workflow automation.
- Partner with product teams, service owners, and platform engineers to deliver intelligent, end-to-end experiences across Microsoft 365.
- Leverage telemetry, automation, and AI-assisted diagnostics to improve service health, accelerate incident mitigation, and enhance engineering productivity.
- Lead complex technical initiatives across teams, influence long-term platform strategy, and drive engineering best practices.
- Mentor engineers and foster a culture of innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement.
- Embody our culture and values
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 modern AI-driven software development practices, tools, and feedback loops, leveraging AI to ac