Microsoft · 18 hours ago
Principal Software Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$140K/yr - $275K/yr
6+ years expMicrosoft is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help build the software systems, AI agents, and automation platforms that power Azure’s global optical backbone. The role involves designing and implementing services for AI-driven operations, focusing on large-scale automation and systems engineering to enhance network reliability and efficiency.
Agentic AIApplication Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware
Responsibilities
Build and Scale Autonomous Network Systems: Design and implement highly available, distributed software systems that power and maintain Azure’s optical network at hyperscale. This includes everything from device-level telemetry, monitoring, and control software to globally distributed automation services that remediate and repair the network autonomously
Full-Stack Systems Engineering: Work across the full stack—from the embedded systems running on optical devices that collect and instrument data, to the cloud-scale services that analyze, decide, and act. Design for safety, resilience, observability, and rapid iteration across millions of data points per second
Agents and Automation Platforms: Develop the next generation of AI-driven agents and orchestration platforms that enable autonomous network operations. Build contextual, sensory, and motor systems that allow agents to perceive, reason about, and act safely and securely on the network
Context and Control Services, including Model Context Protocol/Electronic Services (MCP/eServices): Create and evolve micro-control planes and context services that give AI systems deep awareness of network state, enabling safe decision-making and intelligent automation across the optical domain
Cross-Domain System Integration: Collaborate closely with optical, switching, and AI infrastructure teams to deliver end-to-end, self-healing systems that tie together photonic, packet, and compute control planes
Operational Excellence and Reliability Engineering: Drive engineering rigor through metrics, observability, chaos testing, and continuous validation. Ensure the reliability and security of systems that operate some of the most mission-critical infrastructure in the world
Innovation and Industry Leadership: Contribute to pioneering efforts in autonomous infrastructure management—continuing our track record of delivering industry-first AI agents and platforms that redefine how hyperscale networks are built and operated
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. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter
Preferred
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, OR Python OR 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 equivalent experience
AI Context Engineering: Building context and knowledge services for AI agents, including embeddings and retrieval, vector/time-series stores, feature pipelines, and contract-first Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for tool exposure
AI Agent Development & Evaluation: Designing and assessing AI agents for operational automation with offline/online evaluations, golden sets, canary/A/B testing, safety guardrails, and audit trails
Control & Workflow Expertise: Familiarity with MCP or eServices-style control/context planes, tool interface design, and agent workflow engines such as Temporal or equivalent
Networking & Platform Skills: Exposure to optical networking including Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) link budgeting, Optical Signal to Noise Ratio/Bit Error Rate (OSNR/BER) monitoring, transponder control, metro/long-haul design plus experience with Kubernetes and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Software & Systems experience: 6+ years building production software for network automation and operations; 4+ years designing and running distributed, highly available services at scale; fundamentals in concurrency, reliability, and performance
Programming & Automation experience: 1+ years building closed-loop automation including telemetry collection, streaming/state evaluation, policy orchestration, and safe actuation on network or optical devices and 1+ years of experience with Go or Python
Integration & Observability experience: 1+ years with device/controller interfaces including: Network Configuration Protocol/Yet Another Next Generation (NETCONF/YANG), Google Network Management Interface/Google Network Operations Interface (gNMI/gNOI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), vendor Software Development Kits (SDKs), Remote Procedure Call/Google Remote Procedure Call (RPC/gRPC); observability practices across metrics, logs, and traces, including Service Level Objective (SLO) design, error budgets, and on-call ownership
Security & Leadership experience: 3+ years with Secure-by-design mindset (auth, authorization, key/secret management, auditability) and proven ability to lead cross-functional engineering efforts from design to production with measurable outcomes
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)
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