Principal Software Engineer

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.

Microsoft's Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics with products spanning databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging and real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Our portfolio includes Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a data culture.

The Databases organization delivers trusted, scalable, AI-ready operational databases that power application development across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Our portfolio includes SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, DocumentDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, supporting developers as they build AI-native applications and run critical workloads at global scale.

The One SQL Billing team is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to provide end-to-end technical leadership for billing across Azure SQL Database, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server. These business-critical systems process complex usage and licensing signals across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

In this role, you will improve billing correctness and reliability, address the systemic causes of recurring production incidents, and lead the simplification and modernization of multiple billing and usage-processing pipelines. You will partner across product and platform teams to establish a cohesive long-term architecture and apply AI throughout the engineering lifecycle to improve quality, operational insight, and engineering effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Provide end-to-end technical leadership for One SQL Billing across Azure SQL Database, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server. Turn ambiguous business and engineering needs into a cohesive technical strategy.
• Define and drive a multi-year architecture that simplifies, consolidates, and modernizes existing billing, metering, and usage-processing pipelines while supporting continued business growth.
• Improve billing correctness, reliability, observability, validation, and recovery by identifying systemic risks and eliminating recurring classes of customer- and business-impacting issues.
• Lead technical investigations of complex production incidents, identify clear root causes, and turn incident learnings into lasting architectural, engineering, and operational improvements.
• Build alignment across product, commerce, and platform teams. Influence technical decisions and drive multi-team initiatives toward common billing contracts, controls, and architecture.
• Model the use of AI across architecture and code understanding, development, testing, debugging, validation, incident analysis, and operational engineering. Create reusable practices that improve the effectiveness of the broader engineering organization.
• Embody our culture and values.

Required Qualifications

• 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.

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

• Experience designing, operating, or modernizing large-scale distributed cloud services, high-scale data-processing systems, or other business-critical platforms.
• Experience with billing, commerce, metering, licensing, usage processing, financial data systems, or other systems where correctness and traceability are critical.
• Experience simplifying or redesigning mature production systems that involve multiple pipelines, data contracts, dependencies, and organizational boundaries.
• Proven ability to identify systemic failure patterns, lead complex production incident and root-cause investigations, and turn findings into lasting reliability and architectural improvements.
• Experience providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and aligning diverse stakeholders around a common, multi-quarter technical strategy.
• Experience applying AI-assisted engineering techniques across software design, implementation, testing, debugging, validation, incident investigation, or operational analysis. Experience helping teams adopt reusable, responsible AI engineering practices.
• Experience with Azure, SQL systems, cloud commerce, or hybrid and multicloud services.

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