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# Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI

- **Company:** Microsoft
- **Location:** Redmond, WA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** C (Programming Language), Java (Programming Language), JavaScript (Programming Language), C Sharp (Programming Language), C++ (Programming Language), Databases, Relational Databases, Distributed Systems, Failover, Python (Programming Language), SQL Azure, Reliability Engineering, Database Optimization, Technical Debt, Information Technology
- **Published:** October 9, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerjet.com/job/usd9f6a867c488df2e25a09e4910f77edc/eaa

## About the Role

proactively identify reliability risks, performance regressions, and emerging capacity constraints.Partner with SREs to integrate database health signals into service-level monitoring and reliability models. Incident Response and Root Cause OwnershipServe as the database technical authority during live-site incidents and on-call rotations.Lead root cause analysis for database-related outages and reliability events. Reliability Fundamentals and Reuse Identify and reduce database technical debt to improve maintainability, predictability, and operational simplicity.Build reusable tooling, automation, and standards that improve database operations across the service.Share best practices, documentation, and learnings to raise the reliability bar beyond your immediate team. 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. Extensive experience operating and administering Azure SQL in largescale, highly available, production environments. Proven expertise in database performance tuning, troubleshooting, and optimization for high-traffic, mission-critical systems. Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals as they apply to relational databases, including replication, failover, durability, and consistency. Demonstrated experience designing and executing online schema changes and data migrations on live systems. Experience providing technical leadership during high-severity incident response and driving long-term corrective actions. Ability to influence engineers and architects without direct authority and set technical direction across teams. Experience with Azure SQL, geo-replication, failover groups, and high-availability patterns. Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or reliability-focused engineering roles. Track record of building automation and eliminating manual
operational work. Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping technical strategy across multiple teams.

## Description

software engineers and architects to influence how the service uses Azure SQL, including schema design, access patterns, transaction boundaries, and consistency models.Review and guide database-related design proposals with a focus on long-term reliability, operability, scalability, and cost efficiency.Advocate for engineering solutions that reduce ongoing operational burden and eliminate repetitive manual work. Schema, Configuration, and Data Migrations Lead the design and execution of safe, automated schema changes, configuration updates, and data migrations on live, highly available systems.Establish rollout, validation, and rollback strategies that minimize customer impact and operational risk.Anticipate migration risks and proactively design mitigations before issues surface in production. Observability and Proactive Health Define and evolve deep Azure SQL telemetry, including latency, throughput, waits, failures, saturation signals, and early-warning indicators.Use data to