Principal Software Engineer

Foundations Performance Engineering builds and operates the performance, reliability, and efficiency capabilities that help Agent 365 and the underlying Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Dataverse infrastructure run predictably at global scale. Our work spans workload management, resource governance, admission control, load balancing, capacity planning, performance diagnostics, cloud efficiency and cost attribution, and live-site engineering. We turn deep telemetry into durable platform capabilities so product teams can grow without trading off customer experience, reliability, or cost. 

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set technical direction for the next generation of workload-management and cloud-efficiency systems. This is a hands-on engineering role with organization-wide scope. You will define architecture, write and review production code, guide critical cross-team investments, and lead complex work from ambiguous problem through measured production outcome. Success means lower latency and failure rates, higher infrastructure utilization, faster diagnosis and recovery, and reusable engineering systems that improve every service built on the platform. 

Who Thrives in This Role 

You are a systems thinker who stays close to the code and the production behavior. You can move from a profile or packet trace to an architectural decision, from a noisy live-site signal to a reproducible diagnosis, and from a promising algorithm to a safely measured rollout. You challenge assumptions with data, explain trade-offs clearly, and prefer durable platform improvements over one-off fixes. 

You also move toward the hardest cross-team problems. You are comfortable creating clarity where ownership is distributed, priorities compete, and the right answer requires both deep technical judgment and sustained influence. At this level, you multiply the effectiveness of other engineers while remaining accountable for concrete shipped outcomes. 

Why This Role Matters 

Performance engineering is where customer experience, reliability, and cloud economics meet. The systems you shape will determine how efficiently critical business platforms use capacity, how gracefully they behave under stress, and how quickly engineering teams can understand and correct problems. The impact compounds across services, regions, and customers.

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.

• Set the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for workload management, performance, and infrastructure efficiency across shared Agent 365 Foundation services. 

• Design, build, and operate distributed control-plane and data-plane capabilities for admission control, resource governance, scheduling, load balancing, throttling, capacity allocation, autoscaling, and graceful degradation. 

• Lead the development of algorithms and feedback systems that improve utilization and fairness while protecting customer latency, availability, tenant isolation, and service-level objectives. 

• Build a rigorous performance-engineering system: representative benchmarks, profiling and tracing, production telemetry, anomaly detection, attribution, experimentation, and automated regression prevention. 

• Translate large-scale telemetry and cost signals into prioritized engineering action; establish measurable goals and prove improvements through controlled rollout, shadow-mode validation, fault injection, and production results

• Own critical technical decisions across teams and platforms. Identify dependencies early, resolve architectural conflicts, and create designs that can be adopted incrementally without compromising safety or operability. 

• Operate what you build as a Designated Responsible Individual. Define service-level objectives, participate in on-call, lead complex incident response, and drive root-cause and systemic repair work to closure. 

• Apply Microsoft's Secure Development Lifecycle, Secure by Design, and Secure by Default practices, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential hygiene, safe deployment, and supply-chain integrity. 

• Use AI-assisted and agentic engineering practices to accelerate development, performance analysis, incident triage, and optimization while establishing evaluation, reliability, safety, and cost guardrails. 

• Raise the engineering bar through architecture reviews, code reviews, technical writing, mentoring, and direct collaboration with senior and principal engineers across Agent 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Dataverse, and Azure. 

• Embody Microsoft's Culture and Values.

• 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.

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: