Principal Software Engineer

Team Overview

Are you a customer-obsessed, AI-curious problem-solver who thrives in an inclusive, collaborative global team?

The Azure CXP team’s mission is to transform Microsoft Cloud customers into fans. Through our deep engineering engagements with customers and teams across Microsoft, we analyze and amplify customer needs and drive the vision to improve Cloud quality, security, and reliability. Our culture of growth mindset and empowerment are central to who we are and how we work.

We are customer-obsessed problem-solvers. We orchestrate deep engagements in areas like incident management, support, and enablement. We analyze and amplify those customer voices, both within our own team, and across the Cloud + AI team, bringing the customer connection to the Quality vision for Azure. We innovate ways to scale what we learn across our customer base. Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are, how we work, and what we enable our customers to achieve. We know that empowering our customers starts with empowering our team to show up authentically, work in ways that are best for them, and achieve their career goals. Azure Reliability team is a multidisciplinary engineering organization part of CXP dedicated to making, “Azure the safest and most reliable Cloud”.

We are the Azure Reliability team; a multidisciplinary engineering organization committed to making Azure the world’s safest and most reliable cloud. For Azure’s most critical services and products, we apply a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach. Our software engineers work closely with product teams to enhance availability, reliability, observability, and operability across our planet-scale systems.

We prioritize long-term platform improvements through engineering over repetitive manual tasks. Increasingly, we leverage AI to detect anomalies, predict incidents, and automate operational workflows, amplifying our ability to scale reliability across Azure. Our teams contribute to product architecture, share knowledge and code, and focus on building reusable solutions that benefit multiple teams and services.

We’re not looking for people who know it all, we’re looking for those eager to learn it all. If you thrive on collaboration, embrace challenges, and see mistakes as opportunities to grow, we’d love to meet you.

Every day, our customers stake their business and reputation on our cloud. You can help #AzCXP provide our customers with the world-class cloud services they need to succeed.

Company Culture Statement

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.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

Billions of users across the world rely on our products, and to meet this demand we design and implement world-class distributed systems.

As a Software Engineer in one of our Azure SRE teams, you will be responsible for improving the reliability of key Azure products.

The Azure SRE Key Focus Areas Are

• Building reusable automation and processes that help multiple teams meet their reliability goals. Influencing product architecture and roadmaps to ensure customer-experienced reliability is a core design principle.
• Contributing directly to product code to achieve reliability outcomes. Leveraging AI to proactively detect anomalies, predict incidents, and automate operational workflows - scaling reliability efforts across complex systems.
  
  

We are looking for engineers passionate about the above areas who are also interested in:

• Providing technical leadership across multiple Azure teams. Mentoring others on SRE principles, practices, and tools as well as AI usage to boost software development productivity.
• Designing and developing large-scale distributed software services and solutions. Delivering “best-in-class” engineering by ensuring services are modular, secure, reliable, testable, diagnosable, observable, and reusable.
• Collaborating with internal and external partners to support team goals. Balancing pragmatism with vision—driving continuous improvements in process and codebase. Building automation to prevent or remediate service issues before they impact users.
• Driving innovation in large-scale operations by applying cutting-edge AI tools and techniques to reduce operational toil and scale reliability engineering across complex systems. Gaining a working understanding of Microsoft businesses and contributing to cohesive, end-to-end user experiences.
  
  

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 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 technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• OR equivalent experience working with large-scale distributed systems (e.g., cloud computing providers, SaaS services, etc., ideally with millions or billions of users) or similarly complex environments. 
• Awareness of, and ability to reason about, modern distributed software design patterns and cloud systems architecture, including microservices, containers, load-balancing, queuing, caching.
• Experience with C#/Java/C/C++/Golang.
• Experience in building, shipping and operating reliable solutions.
• Operated large-scale distributed systems with high availability requirements
• Built or evolved monitoring and alerting systems that drive actionable insights, not alert fatigue
• Delivered cross-team influence, mentoring engineers, and shaping engineering culture
• Navigated production incidents and led postmortems that changed operational practices
• Partnered closely with product, data science, and AI teams to ship reliable, intelligent services
• Cloud Infrastructure (Azure, AWS, GCP) — design, provisioning, scaling, cost optimization
• Kubernetes & Container Orchestration — advanced deployment patterns, service mesh, troubleshooting
• CI/CD Engineering — implementing resilient pipelines, artifact management, automated testing frameworks
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with modern distributed software design patterns and cloud systems architecture, including microservices, containers, load balancing, queuing, caching.
• Experience as a technical lead or engineering manager.
• Experience working on large and unfamiliar codebases (millions of lines of code).
• Experience with open-source projects, Kubernetes, Linux and containers is desired.
• Proven track record in building, shipping, and operating reliable solutions.
• Proficiency in programming languages like C#/Java/Python.
• Experience with data technologies (SQL/NoSQL/etc.).
• Experience with Azure is a plus.
• Experience in AI adoption with tools like GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI and custom copilots to streamline development and reduce toil.
• Systems thinking: sees how architecture, process, and people interplay
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to set technical direction under uncertainty
• Mentorship: coaching senior engineers to raise the team’s bar
• Strong communication to align stakeholders at multiple levels
  
  

Other Qualifications

• 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.
  
  

#AZCXP #AzRelJobs

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.