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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI - **Company:** Microsoft - **Location:** Dallas County, TX, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $142,800.0 - $274,800.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** C (Programming Language), Java (Programming Language), JavaScript (Programming Language), Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Online Services, C Sharp (Programming Language), C++ (Programming Language), Databases, Concurrency Controls, Relational Databases, Distributed Systems, Failover, Python (Programming Language), SQL Azure, Performance Tuning, Reliability Engineering, Cloud Services, Software Engineering, SQL Stored Procedures, SQL Databases, Azure Service Bus, Database Optimization, Technical Debt, Information Technology, Low Latency - **Published:** October 11, 2026 - **Apply:** https://diversityjobs.com/career/18614040/Principal-Software-Engineer-Coreai-Texas-Irving ## About the Role * 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. 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., * Extensive experience operating and administeringAzure SQL in largescale, highly available, production environments. * Proven expertise in database performance tuning, troubleshooting, and optimization for hightraffic, missioncritical 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 highseverity incident response and driving longterm corrective actions. * Ability to influence engineers and architects without direct authority and set technical direction across teams. * Experience with Azure SQL, georeplication, failover groups, and highavailability patterns. * Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or reliabilityfocused engineering roles. * Track record of building automation and eliminating manual operational work. * Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping technical strategy across multiple teams. 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. ## Description Microsoft Azure powers some of the world's most missioncritical cloud services. At this scale, database reliability, performance, and operational excellence are foundational to customer trust.We are looking for a Principal Software Engineerto provide technical leadership for the database layer of a firstparty Azure service built on Azure SQL. This role goes beyond traditional DBA responsibilities. You will shape how the service designs, uses, operates, and evolves its databases at scale-partnering closely with software engineers, SREs, and architects to drive durable reliability and performance improvements.Success in this role is measured by servicelevel impact, technical influence, and longterm reliability outcomes, not by task execution alone., Database Reliability, Performance, and Scale Own the availability, durability, and performance of largescale Azure SQL databases supporting a production Azure service.Lead deep performance tuning efforts, including query plan analysis, indexing strategies, concurrency control, stored procedure optimization, and workload isolation.Diagnose and resolve complex issues such as deadlocks, blocking, resource contention, latency spikes, memory pressure, and failover behaviors.Define and drive capacity planning models, performance guardrails, and growth readiness strategies. Engineering Partnership and Architectural Influence Partner with 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 databaserelated design proposals with a focus on longterm 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 earlywarning indicators.Use data to proactively identify reliability risks, performance regressions, and emerging capacity constraints.Partner with SREs to integrate database health signals into servicelevel monitoring and reliability models. Incident Response and Root Cause OwnershipServe as the database technical authority during livesite incidents and oncall rotations.Lead root cause analysis for databaserelated 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.