Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Microsoft’s Observability & Intelligent Cloud team is reimagining how large-scale cloud services stay reliable. We build intelligent systems that help prevent incidents, detect failures earlier, accelerate diagnosis and mitigation, and reduce operational effort across Microsoft services.

Our work spans the full reliability lifecycle—from telemetry and anomaly detection to AI-assisted diagnosis, safe automation, and intuitive operational experiences. You will help create secure, scalable platforms that protect customers and enable engineering teams to operate services with greater speed and confidence.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate reliable backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and automation workflows.
• Create intelligent capabilities that turn large volumes of operational data into timely, actionable insights for engineering teams.
• Apply software engineering and AI techniques to improve anomaly detection, alert correlation, incident diagnosis, and safe mitigation.
• Investigate production issues, identify root causes, and turn lessons from live-service events into durable product and engineering improvements.
• Partner with service teams, product managers, and engineers to understand reliability challenges and translate them into scalable solutions.
• Improve the security, observability, performance, quality, and maintainability of the services you own.
• Contribute to technical designs, documentation, operational readiness, and shared engineering practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Strong experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems, cloud services, or large-scale backend platforms.

• Strong technical depth in service architecture, reliability, debugging, performance, security, and operational excellence.

• Proven ability to lead ambiguous technical work from problem framing through design, execution, deployment, and production support.

• Strong cross-team collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to influence technical decisions across partner teams.

• Experience collaborating across teams and communicating technical concepts clearly to engineering and product stakeholders.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.