Principal Software Engineer - Gaming

Are you passionate about creating safe and inclusive online communities? Do you want to work at the intersection of Distributed Systems and Artificial Intelligence in a high-scale, customer-facing domain? How about impacting experience for millions of customers? If so, we have an exciting opportunity for you!  

The Safety Engineering group within the Gaming organization at Microsoft is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our team. Our mission is to protect gaming communities at Microsoft and beyond from ongoing and emerging harms. We develop context-aware safety solutions that operate across all media content types including text, image, audio and video. Our solutions operate at high scale, low customer latencies while leveraging state-of-the-art generative AI technologies. Our moderation solutions are designed to be generic, serving not only Gaming but also the rest of Microsoft and supporting third-party customers worldwide.  

Our team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead cross-team engineering efforts through the next generation of product and technical evolution in the Content Moderation and Safety space. In this role, you will be at the forefront of architecture evolution for a multi-year engineering roadmap as well as leading execution of these solutions. You will collaborate with other teams across Xbox, Microsoft, and the gaming industry. You will also have the chance to mentor and grow engineers across teams, foster a culture of customer focus, collaboration, and drive technical excellence and innovation. If this opportunity sounds exciting to you, we can't wait to meet you and see how you bring your unique talents to work with us. 

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:  

• Leads complex initiatives across multiple engineering teams and stakeholders - including driving clarity through ambiguous requirements, defining technical approaches, implementing critical path code and launching them in production with high technical and operational quality. 

• Collaborates effectively with cross-discipline stakeholders and partners including product, customer, program and data science teams. 

• Writes architectural roadmaps generating directional clarity for technical evolution across multiple engineering teams. 

• Provides technical leadership influencing partners and stakeholders through subject matter expertise. 

• Leads by example and sets best practices for others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. 

• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. 

• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers. 

Qualifications

Required/Minimum 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, or Python  

• OR equivalent experience.  

• 4+ years of experience with building large-scale, real-time, high-availability, low latency distributed systems.    

• 4+ years of experience designing secure and scalable services leveraging cloud technologies like Azure and/or AWS 

• 3+ years of experience engineering solutions leveraging Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence technologies. 

Additional/Preferred Qualifications: 

• 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. 

• 1+ years of experience working on modern generative AI-based products/tools in production 

• Experienced leadership bringing data-driven and customer-focused approaches to technical solutions. 

• Proven leadership skills to influence decision making across large organization and drive complex projects with multiple stakeholder teams.  

• Proven leadership skills fostering knowledge sharing and growth within the team. 

• Experience with online safety related development areas.   

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until February 24, 2025

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.