Principal Software Engineer

We are building the next-generation real-time enforcement platform that protects users, advertisers, and the integrity of Microsoft’s Ads and content ecosystems. This infrastructure processes and evaluates hundreds of billions of signals each day, applying safety and policy decisions with millisecond latency and global reliability.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will define and drive the architecture of the core systems behind this platform—spanning real-time decision services, streaming pipelines, and ML inference integration. You will also help lay the foundation for emerging AI-enabled enforcement flows, including agentic workflows that reason, adapt, and take multi-step actions using large language models and learned policies.

This is a hands-on IC leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep system design, web-scale performance, and long-term platform evolution—and who is both curious about how AI can augment infrastructure, and pragmatic about where and how it should.

 

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

• Design and evolve large-scale, low-latency distributed systems that evaluate ads, content, and signals in milliseconds across global workloads.
• Lead architectural efforts across stream processing pipelines, real-time scoring services, policy engines, and ML integration points.
• Define system-level strategies for scalability, performance optimization, observability, and failover resilience.
• Partner with ML engineers and applied scientists to integrate models into production with cost-efficiency, modularity, and runtime predictability.
• Guide technical direction for next-generation capabilities, including the early architecture of agentic/LLM-powered policy orchestration flows.
• Influence platform-wide standards, review designs across teams, and mentor senior engineers through deep technical leadership.

Qualifications

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
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience in backend or distributed systems engineering, with a proven record of system-level architectural leadership.
• Advanced proficiency in C++, C# or equivalent systems languages.
• Deep experience designing and scaling streaming or real-time systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Beam).
• Solid command of performance profiling, load testing, capacity planning, and operational rigor.
• Comfort designing systems for high QPS, low latency, and regulatory traceability.
• Familiarity with ML inference orchestration, model deployment workflows, or online feature pipelines.

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:

• 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.
• 10+ years of experience in backend or distributed systems engineering, with a proven record of system-level architectural leadership.
• Understanding of LLM integration, RAG, or agentic task flows, even at an architectural/infra layer.
• Experience building systems that support human-in-the-loop moderation, policy evolution, or adaptive enforcement logic.
  Experience building efficient, scalable ML inference platforms.

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. 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.

 

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