Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Within AI Platform, the Azure AI Search team powers rich knowledge base experiences for apps of all kinds. We integrate the best of Microsoft AI for content understanding, search relevance, and knowledge sources.

Join Azure AI Search Engineering Foundations as a Principal Software Engineer and shape the way that we work, but our team culture. In this role, you’ll have the freedom to innovate on engineering processes and developer tooling—impacting how we build, validate, ship, and operate AI Search at scale and securely. We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer who leads by example, hands-on and is passionate about using and discovering AI tools to transform and level up our developer productivity. This position gives you the space to experiment, modernize, and influence the foundations that empower all Azure AI Search engineers. If you thrive on driving change, collaborating across teams, and want to be at the forefront of how AI is used to build AI, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

Our team’s work is about becoming subject matter experts across critical engineering domains and setting the standards that empower every AI Search developer to succeed. We focus on areas like identity, secrets, authentication, certificates, pipelines, tools, DevOps, build, test and validation frameworks, lab environments and management, and security. Our role is to deeply understand these domains, partner with Azure and Microsoft infrastructure teams, and establish guidelines and processes that remove friction for our engineering community.

What makes our work truly interesting is the customer focus and empathy required: we listen to our developers, anticipate their challenges, and proactively design solutions that help them achieve their goals faster and more securely. Whether it’s defining best practices for secure identity management, streamlining CI/CD pipelines, architecting our infrastructure, or creating frameworks for automated validation, our impact is measured by the success of the engineers we support.

If you’re passionate about becoming an expert, leading engineering culture, and making a tangible difference for our developers, you’ll find our team’s work both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Responsibilities

• You will be the technical leader of the Engineering Foundations teams where you will mentor and grow the talent of the team.
• You will lead and define AI Search developers experience so that the engineering organization will thrive and have the best-in-class experience.
• You will regularly innovate and integrate the application of AI and modern tools that will result in developer adoption and boost their productivity.
• You embody secure mindset, foster an inclusive and high trust team culture.
• Partner, teach and incrementally deliver solutions with Azure AI Search Engineering team that is scalable, reliable, and efficient.
• You will be comfortable with ambiguity and deal with complex situations by creating clarity, defining a vision and driving towards results that are measurable.

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.

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:

• 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 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 leading organization through architecture and technical design of aspects of a product that include customer facing and infrastructure as a platform.
• Engineering robust and streamlined software solutions from design, implementation, and delivery that is scalable, reliable, and secure.
• Success in communicating to drive mutual success through collaborative innovation, conflict resolution, and negotiation.
• Partners with and influence appropriate stakeholders.
• Leverages expertise to determine and confirm requirements. Seeks and leverages a variety of feedback channels and data to discover insights into future designs or solution fixes.

Key skills/competency

• Azure AI Search
• Developer Productivity
• DevOps
• Cloud Security
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Software Architecture
• Large-Scale Systems
• AI Tools
• Technical Leadership
• Programming (Multi-language)