Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers to levels they cannot achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, and more openness in a cloud-enabled world.  The Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization powers mission-critical Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 services, including BizChat, Work IQ, Agent 365, and the agent runtime for the next era of work. Together, we are building the platform that will power Microsoft's AI experiences for decades to come. We are looking for Principal Software Engineer to join our team!  

This is an exciting time to join our group and work on something highly strategic to Microsoft. Microsoft Dataverse is the platform to securely store an enormous amount of data in a cost efficient, scalable and easily manageable way. This team builds a suite of microservices to get near real-time insights over your data. You will be a part of a team of engineers who thrive on solving complex problems at scale while doing it with impeccable quality. 

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.  

As a Principal Software Engineer in the Microsoft Dataverse team, you will define and drive the technical strategy for intelligent, globally distributed services that power Dataverse. You will lead through influence, raise engineering standards, and partner across disciplines and organizations to deliver durable customer outcomes.

• Define and evolve the end-to-end architecture for complex, AI-enabled customer experience capabilities, making sound trade-offs across scale, latency, availability, security, cost, and time to market.

• Demonstrate strong end-to-end ownership for critical technical areas, from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, operational health, and long-term improvement. Proactively identify gaps, drive issues to closure, and remain accountable for customer and business outcomes.

• Effectively manage multiple priorities and competing demands, balancing strategic engineering investments, customer commitments, live-site issues, and operational responsibilities while maintaining high standards for quality and execution.

• Adapt quickly to shifting priorities and business needs, making clear trade-offs, re-planning effectively, and redirecting engineering efforts when customer impact, reliability, security, or business priorities change.

• Operate with urgency and sound judgment in ambiguous environments, independently identifying what needs to be done, bringing the right partners together, and driving execution without waiting for detailed direction.

• Lead implementation of critical platform components, producing high-quality production code, and resolving the most complex design, performance, and debugging challenges across distributed systems.

• Drive technical strategy across teams and organizations, translating business and customer needs into coherent multi-release investments, interfaces, and engineering plans.

• Provide technical leadership for applied AI systems, including model and framework selection, evaluation, grounding, orchestration, responsible AI controls, monitoring, and lifecycle management.

• Own quality, security, compliance, and operability by design, establishing automation, validation, deployment, observability, incident response, and safe rollout practices for mission-critical services.

• Lead resolution of high-severity live-site and customer issues, coordinating across dependencies, driving root-cause analysis, and converting operational learning into systemic prevention.

• Multiply the effectiveness of the engineering organization by mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture and code, establishing reusable patterns, simplifying systems, and raising standards for engineering excellence.

• Architecture and Technical Strategy: Deep experience defining architecture for distributed systems and driving technical decisions across organizational boundaries.

• Applied AI and AI Operations: Experience shipping generative AI, large language model, or agentic capabilities with rigorous evaluation, safety, monitoring, and lifecycle practices.

• Cloud and Infrastructure: Expertise building and operating highly available services on Azure or another major cloud, including containers, data platforms, networking, security, and observability.

• Engineering Excellence: Demonstrated ability to improve quality, reliability, security, maintainability, and developer productivity across a substantial engineering area.

• Leadership and Influence: Proven ability to communicate complex technical topics, build alignment among senior stakeholders, mentor engineers, and lead through influence across teams and time zones.

• Customer and Business Impact: Experience translating customer scenarios into platform investments and leading response to complex enterprise or live-site issues.

• Problem Solving: Exceptional coding, debugging, systems thinking, and decision-making skills in ambiguous, high-impact environments.

• 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.

Other Requirements:

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 Qualifications: