Microsoft · 20 hours ago
Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI
Redmond, WA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$140K/yr - $275K/yr
6+ years expMicrosoft is dedicated to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, and they are seeking a Principal Software Engineer for their CoreAI team. This role involves fine-tuning advanced AI models, improving performance and reliability, and mentoring other engineers while adhering to best practices in coding and design.
Application Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentData ManagementDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware
Responsibilities
Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across products that adheres to design specifications
Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy
Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Identifies and anticipates blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalates them, communicates how they will impact timelines, and then leads efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them
Leads efforts on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions while developing code before issues occur across products in production
Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations
Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, the implementation of repair actions, and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence
Proactively applies least-access principles, uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and drives those practices across the team
Reviews product code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Brings insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills
Conducts code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team
Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered
Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews, providing feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices
Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process
Owns and leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost)
Leads the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best
Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions
Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members
Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements
Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems
Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions
Leads efforts to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations
Upholds Microsoft's standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations
Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others
Leads the refinement of products through data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration
Reviews complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements
Mentors others on and independently creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code
Mentors others on and independently ensures test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases)
Leads adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite
Mentors others on, and builds testable code and considers testability during design for a set of solutions
Understands the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applies them across the architecture as appropriate
Designs and executes plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code for a set of solutions
Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation
Applies and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises
Remains current by investing time and effort into being informed staying abreast of current developments. Proactively seeks new knowledge, evaluating new trends, technical solutions, and patterns, assessing how to adapt them to current problems, and shares knowledge with other engineers
Conducts learning and literary sessions to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge)
Qualification
Required
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
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
Preferred
5+ years of experience writing production code in building internet scale services and distributed systems
Ability to debug, read code and work on a large and increasing codebase
Engineering knowledge of machine learning systems and data pipelines
Excellent communication and presentation skills
Benefits
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
Company
Microsoft
Microsoft is a software corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Microsoft has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
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2025 (9192)
2024 (9343)
2023 (7677)
2022 (11403)
2021 (7210)
2020 (7852)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$1MKey Investors
Technology Venture Investors
2022-12-09Post Ipo Equity
1986-03-13IPO
1981-09-01Series Unknown· $1M
Leadership Team
Satya Nadella
Chairman and CEO
Vukani Mngxati
Chief Executive Officer - Microsft South Africa
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