Software Engineer 2 - Core AI

Overview: Software Engineer 2 - Core AI at Microsoft

The Experimentation Platform (ExP) team at Microsoft is at the forefront of enabling data-driven decisions at an unparalleled scale. This team powers Microsoft’s end-to-end experimentation ecosystem for major products like Copilot, Bing, Office, Windows, Edge, Xbox, and Azure. As a Software Engineer 2 - Core AI, you will contribute to building the core experimentation framework, compute platform, data pipelines, and AI-assisted agentic capabilities that execute millions of experiments annually.

This role offers a unique opportunity to develop modern user experiences, high-performant distributed systems, and integrate AI-driven agents into a mission-critical experimentation stack. You will focus on improving end-to-end fundamentals such as efficiency, observability, and resiliency, collaborating with cross-functional teams across engineering, data science, and AI to deliver a seamless experimentation experience at a global scale.

Microsoft is dedicated to empowering every person and organization to achieve more, fostering a culture of growth mindset, innovation, respect, integrity, and accountability.

Responsibilities

• Design and build essential components of the experimentation platform, including large-scale data pipelines, metrics/analysis authoring, distributed workflows, and critical experiment lifecycle services.
• Develop high-performance and reliable systems utilizing C#, .NET, Spark pipelines, Azure services, and modern data/compute frameworks.
• Integrate AI-driven agents and automation to enhance debugging, monitoring, validation, and self-service capabilities for experiment owners.
• Optimize platform efficiency, cost, resource utilization, and pipeline throughput across Microsoft's global fleet.
• Improve core platform fundamentals, including observability, reliability, test automation, and recovery workflows.
• Collaborate extensively with Product Managers, data scientists, platform engineers, and partner teams globally to design scalable solutions.
• Actively participate in code reviews, incident response, performance tuning, and critical architectural discussions.
• Engineer features with a strong emphasis on quality, transparency, resiliency, and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in software engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages such as C#, Java, Scala, Python, or C++.
• Demonstrated ability to design and deliver components for large distributed systems or data platforms.
• Solid foundational understanding of data structures, algorithms, distributed system fundamentals, and debugging complex systems.
• A fast learner with excellent communication skills and the proven ability to collaborate effectively across diverse teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• An "AI native" mindset, embracing AI agents in daily work. Hands-on experience with tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or Codex is highly valued.
• Familiarity with popular A/B testing products, such as Statsig.
• Experience in large-scale data processing technologies, including Spark, Cosmos, Data Lake, or equivalent systems.
• Knowledge of AI agents, agent frameworks, automation systems, or a keen interest in building agentic workflows.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure services (e.g., EventHub, Storage, Container Apps, Kubernetes, Functions).
• Strong understanding of performance optimization, resource efficiency, observability, and debugging in distributed compute environments.
• Experience building or supporting experimentation platforms, A/B testing systems, or data-driven product infrastructure.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, reliability engineering principles, and managing large-scale production service operations.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Data Pipelines
• AI Agents
• C# / .NET
• Spark
• Azure Services
• Experimentation Platforms
• Performance Optimization
• Observability
• Reliability Engineering