Principal Software Engineer

Overview

In Azure Specialized, we are collaboratively working to bring the next generation of workloads to our Public Cloud platform. We work together across Microsoft to enable end-to-end new scenarios for Azure customers. Our team imagines and builds differentiating customer features and fundamental building blocks at the heart of the Azure platform, working collaboratively with many industry partners.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be critical in designing and delivering the next generations of AI training, AI inferencing, and many more. You will be challenged across a wide spectrum of hardware architectures, network types, and processor types. You will define and drive an end-to-end vertical view, defining approaches and strategies across large organizations with continuous focus on customer value, quality, performance, and automation.

This position involves deep technical work, focusing on defining, deploying, and sustaining hardware and software Azure infrastructure for AI and other GPU-based workloads. The work for this position focuses on hardware/software interaction, coding and playing with next-gen hardware, end-to-end systems engineering anywhere in the infrastructure - from fiber networking, switches, GPU differentiation, rack design, cluster design, and more. This position offers a unique opportunity to have a huge impact on customers and the world. It is an exciting time for the team as we are working on expanding the capacity and range of supported scenarios to support the next 100X growth. #azurecore

Responsibilities

• Willing to dive deeply into any level or layer of a problem.
• Willing to learn emerging technologies, from hardware to software. Evaluate and make recommendations that advance Azure infrastructure for AI and other GPU-based workloads.
• Leads by example within the team by producing extensible and maintainable code. Optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices.
• Maintains communication with key partners across the Microsoft ecosystem of engineers. Acts as a key contact for leadership to ensure alignment with partners' expectations.
• Considers partner teams across organizations and their end goals for products to drive and achieve desirable user experiences and fitting dynamic needs of partners/customers through product development.
• Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Creates, implements, optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to establish and improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI).
• Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and guides 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 initiates actions to restore system/product/service for simple and complex problems when appropriate.
• Help to establish innovative infrastructure to manage data at scale, work closely with lead customers and build reliable monitoring pipelines.

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.
• 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:

• Bachelor'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 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 equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience building services to manage data at scale.
• 6+ years of experience as data analyst or DBA is a big plus.

Key skills/competency

• AI and GPU workloads
• Azure infrastructure development
• End-to-end system design
• Hardware/Software interaction
• Distributed systems engineering
• Performance optimization
• Data at scale management
• Cloud computing platforms
• Coding (C, C++, Python)
• Automation strategies