Microsoft · 2 weeks ago
Principal AI Engineer
Redmond, WA
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
$163K/yr - $296K/yr
8+ years expMicrosoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate and envision what can be. They are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead real-time AI that powers agentic workflows on live operational data, driving capabilities such as autonomous agents and anomaly detection. The role involves setting the technical direction for agentic systems and building features that help organizations automate their real-time data.
Agentic AIApplication Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware
Responsibilities
Design and ship autonomous agents that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows, integrating with MCP tools, APIs, action registry, and internal data sources
Build and evolve the evaluations platform (offline evals, golden datasets, LLM-as-judge/auto-raters) and integrate it into CI/CD so every model, prompt, and agent change is tested before and after release
Partner cross-functionally with product, design, research, and data science to establish observability and quality guardrails for LLM and agent workloads, including telemetry, tracing, dashboards, and metrics for task success, safety, cost, and latency, and use them to support A/B tests and phased rollouts
Provide technical leadership and mentorship, setting standards for design, coding, eval practices, and Responsible AI, while driving multi-team initiatives that raise the bar for reliability and user impact
Qualification
Required
Bachelor'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 equivalent experience
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
Preferred
Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
Demonstrated experience shipping LLM-powered features or agentic systems in production (e.g., copilots, assistants, workflow agents, tool-calling systems)
Experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and modern infrastructure practices (microservices, containers, orchestration, CI/CD)
Strong proficiency in Python (and/or another backend language such as C# or Java) and experience building production services or platforms
Proven ability to define architectures, make trade-offs, and lead multi-team projects from design through launch
Background in evaluation of ML/LLM systems: designing test sets, rubrics, human and auto-rater evaluation pipelines
Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
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)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
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
Recent News
2026-01-16
Morningstar.com
2026-01-16
Company data provided by crunchbase