Principal Software Engineer

Join the “Microsoft AI Web Data Platform Team” as a Principal Software Engineer, in a technical leadership capacity, to architect platforms and deliver Internet scale web documents, with full richness to Ground LLMs for 1st party Copilots and 3rd party AI solutions.

In this role, you’ll play a key role in building large scale platforms that are fundamental to Bing Search, AI Grounding and Microsoft AI training driving transformative scenarios powering massive scale of users while processing tens of billions of documents per day and managing hundreds of petabytes of data. A suitable candidate will bring a blend of expertise in large-scale data platforms & AI.

In today’s AI-driven world, where data is more valuable than ever, we’re embarking on an exciting mission to elevate our platform, harnessing additional richness to position it as the integral building block of AI solutions across the industry. If you’re passionate about building high-performance systems that shape the future of data platforms that power AI solutions, this is the place for you!

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

• Align team efforts with business and user requirements by collaborating with stakeholders to define priorities, resolve dependencies, and ensure delivery of well-documented design and implementation plans for products, applications, services, or platforms.

• Guide system design and architectural decisions across multiple components, encouraging the use of data and telemetry to make informed decisions.

• Drive engineering excellence by fostering a culture of building modular, secure, reliable, testable, maintainable, and reusable solutions, while promoting active monitoring practices.

• Establish quality assurance strategies by setting standards for improving test coverage, streamlining integration testing, and addressing critical problem areas proactively.

• Oversee and improve operational reliability, guiding efforts to troubleshoot and optimize automation, monitoring, and Live Site health.

• Bachelor’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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’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 Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• Experience with large-scale distributed data platforms, such as: Apache Spark, Kafka, Columnar storage, data modeling and schema designs.

• Experience as a technical lead/Architect.

• Experience in large scale system architecture, design, development, testing, and release, including but not limited to web applications, microservices in layers, database design, API design, performance tuning, telemetry design and analysis.

• Demonstrated programming skills and knowledge of architectural patterns for large, high-scale applications.

• Experience in ML/AI.

• Proficient analytical skills with systematic and structured approaches to software design.

• Fluent communication skills to articulate technical details.

• Ability to navigate cross-organization to influence stakeholders.

#MicrosoftAI #BING

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 per year.