Senior 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, Trust, and Responsibility (STaR) group within the Gaming organization at Microsoft is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team. Our mission is to protect gaming communities at Microsoft and beyond from ongoing and emerging harms. We develop engineering solutions to proactively moderate and filter inappropriate content using state-of-the-art AI techniques. Our team is full of talented engineers with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we can't wait to meet you and see how you bring your unique talents to work with us.   

A bit more about the team: Our team develops contextual text classification solutions that operate at high scale, meeting low customer latencies and extending across many languages. We are at the cutting edge, leveraging generative AI and prompt optimization technologies. We are developing multi-cloud solutions using technologies across Azure and AWS. Our 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 Senior Software Engineer to lead engineering efforts through the next generation of 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 also collaborate with other teams across Xbox, Microsoft, and the gaming industry. You will also have the chance to mentor and grow other engineers on your and peer teams, foster a culture of customer focus, collaboration, and drive technical excellence and innovation. 

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

• Collaborates with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a scenario. 
• Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. 
• Creates, implements, optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to establish and improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). 
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of product features and partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive a workgroup's project plans, release plans, and work items. 
• Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and guides other engineers by developing and following the playbook, working on call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions, alerting stakeholders about status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for simple and complex problems when appropriate. 
• 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. 

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python 
  • OR equivalent experience. 
• 4+ years of experience with distributed systems, performance analysis, databases, and/or large-scale data processing   
• 4+ years of experience designing secure and scalable services leveraging cloud technologies like Azure and/or AWS

Additional/Preferred Qualifications: 

• Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, compliance, and livesite operations.
• Experience with AI / Machine Learning, Data Analysis.
• Proven leadership skills to influence decision making across large organization and drive complex projects with multiple stakeholder teams. 
• Experience with online safety or trust-related development areas.  

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 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 $153,600 - $250,200 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 October 15, 2024.

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.