About this role
Principal Software Engineer - VS Code (GitHub - CoreAI)
United States, Washington, Redmond
Job description
Company and benefits
Job number
200055937
Date posted
Sep 22, 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
VS Code is where millions of developers turn ideas into working software. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to tackle hard product and platform challenges as VS Code and GitHub Copilot continue to reshape how developers build software.
You will help to evolve VS Code as a market leading developer environment, seamlessly connecting its editor, agentic coding abilities, platform and extension ecosystem. You will identify where investment matters, prove difficult ideas in code, and establish approaches that multiple teams can build on. This is hands-on technical leadership: the opportunity to change both what developers can accomplish and what our engineering teams can deliver.
About the team
We work in the open, with direct feedback from developers and extension authors. You will partner with engineers, designers, researchers, and product leaders across our team, GitHub, and Microsoft. We combine community feedback, research, experiments, and engineering judgment to decide what to build. Performance, accessibility, extensibility, security, and developer control are part of the product, not finishing touches.
Examples of work
The role spans core VS Code and Copilot; illustrative projects include:
- Address architectural bottlenecks in large workspaces, proving an approach in code that multiple feature teams can adopt.
- Define extension or workspace APIs that unlock new capabilities while preserving compatibility with existing extensions and remote development environments.
- Prototype how developers delegate, review, and validate work with Copilot, then establish the product and platform boundaries needed to ship it.
- Reshape and support our engineering process with custom solutions fine-tuned for throughput and quality.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As part of GitHub and CoreAI, we build developer tools that materially improve how software is written, reviewed, and shipped, while maintaining a culture of ownership, rigor, and technical excellence.
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
- Identify significant product opportunities and systemic engineering problems; set technical direction that balances near-term delivery with long-term product and platform health.
- Prove approaches through prototypes, critical implementation, testing, and difficult debugging, using hands-on work to guide architectural decisions.
- Lead cross-team delivery across Microsoft and GitHub, resolving architectural disagreements, clarifying ownership and API boundaries, and enabling teams to deliver independently.
- Own outcomes beyond release, using adoption, quality signals, evaluations, experiments, and user feedback to guide investment and adjust course.
- Improve en