Principal Software Engineer

Overview

The Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology Operations (AIOps) Health Platform team at Microsoft builds and operates one of the company's highest-scale, mission-critical cloud services. This platform powers Azure Monitor, Azure Resource Health, and core health and alerting capabilities used by both internal Microsoft services and external Azure customers. Processing billions of signals daily and generating millions of alerts monthly, it enables engineering teams company-wide to ensure reliable service performance at a global scale.

As Microsoft advances into the next era of AIOps, the mission is to empower cloud engineers to achieve more with reduced operational effort. The team leverages machine learning, intelligent signal processing, and large-scale distributed systems to proactively detect issues, minimize operational load, and deliver actionable insights across areas like compute and storage. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale cloud infrastructure, AI-driven health modeling, and service reliability.

In this position, you will join a team responsible for complex, horizontally scaled cloud systems. You will collaborate closely with engineering partners across Azure to design next-generation health, monitoring, and incident-management capabilities. Your contributions will include system architecture, technical strategy guidance, and feature delivery that directly supports Microsoft’s operational excellence. You will also work alongside senior engineers, uphold high-quality engineering practices, and mentor others, all while shaping the future of AIOps at Microsoft.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we foster a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. We build on values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture efforts for complex products, including making design decisions, creating design documents, evaluating new technologies, and ensuring system requirements like performance, compliance, and security are met.
• Identify and manage dependencies across teams and systems, coordinating collaboration and resolving conflicts to achieve aligned delivery schedules.
• Lead security best practices, including secure code design, security monitoring, and incident response, ensuring compliance with security standards and AI safety features.
• Mentor and lead coding efforts to produce extensible, maintainable, secure, and high-performance code, improve code quality, and lead debugging and incident retrospectives.
• Collaborate with partner teams to ensure integrated solutions meet scalability, performance, and operational readiness before deployment.
• Act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and guide 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 initiating actions to restore system/product/service for simple and complex problems when appropriate.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field AND 6+ years of 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 a related technical field AND 8+ years of 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 a related technical field AND 12+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience in designing and building high-scale and reliable distributed systems or cloud-scale services.
• 2+ years of proficiency with observability concepts (telemetry, logging, metrics, detection) and operational excellence.
• 1+ year of experience collaborating across teams and delivering exceptional solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Key skills/competency

• AIOps
• Cloud Services
• Distributed Systems
• Machine Learning
• System Architecture
• Operational Excellence
• Incident Management
• Security Practices
• Observability
• C# / Java / Python