Software Engineer II

Overview

Imagine shaping the reliability backbone of one of the world’s most critical communication platforms, where every improvement you make impacts millions of users and thousands of engineers.

The IC3 Platform Engineering team that powers communication platforms and products at Microsoft, including Microsoft Teams, is building an AI-forward unified, high-performance developer ecosystem that advances engineering practices and operational consistency across hundreds of services of Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud Communication (IC3).

Our Mission Is Twofold

• Enable developer productivity at scale for humans, AI-assisted and agentic development.
• Make observability, diagnostics, and AI forward operational excellence across IC3 effortless and world-class.

You will join a newly formed group focused on transforming how IC3 builds, deploys, and operates services in modern cloud environments. This means designing systems and automation that eliminate blind spots, detect issues early, and reduce operational friction, so incidents become rare, shallow, and short.

Modern cloud systems demand more than just automation. They require strong guarantees around traceability, compliance, and operational safety. Our platform is designed to provide those guarantees.

We build and operate a robust Infrastructure as Code (IaC) foundation, powered by templates and automation, to standardize Azure resource provisioning across hundreds of services. This ensures consistency and repeatability while reducing configuration drift. We continuously detect and enforce configuration compliance, collect rich telemetry signals, and provide actionable diagnostics that help teams identify issues early and resolve them quickly.

Beyond reliability, we embed capacity optimization and cost-awareness directly into the platform, while enforcing security, compliance, and Safe Deployment Practices (SDP) as default guardrails rather than optional steps. The result is a system where safety, scalability, and operational excellence are built in - not bolted on.

By centralizing SRE capabilities and building strong platform abstractions, we empower hundreds of service teams to move faster with confidence. Engineers spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. Reliability becomes a feature - not an afterthought.

If you’re motivated by high-impact technical challenges at unparalleled scale, and excited about combining engineering productivity with AI-enabled development, this is an opportunity to shape the next stage of your career and help us reinvent the future of how IC3 builds and runs software.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We approach this work with a growth mindset, a strong sense of ownership, and a culture grounded in respect, integrity, and accountability. We value inclusion, technical depth, and engineers who care about building systems that others rely on every day, and we approach this work with a growth mindset, strong ownership, and a culture grounded in respect, integrity, and accountability.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop platform features for large-scale distributed software services and solutions.
• Adhere to and drive modern software engineering practices through design and code reviews.
• Develop engineering for our services ensuring that the services and components are well-defined and modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored, and reusable.
• Write clean and optimized code, improve test coverage for services, organize and implement integration tests, and resolve problem areas.
• Gain a working understanding of Microsoft as a business and collaborate with others to contribute to cohesive, end-to-end experiences for our users.
• Focus on customer/partner needs through a data-driven approach.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications (RQs)

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years experience with technical fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, or cloud-native architecture.

Other Requirements

• 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 (PQs)

• Bachelor'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#, Java, JavaScript, Python, or Rust OR Master'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, Python, or Rust.
• 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
• Experience working on SDKs.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Cloud-Native Architecture
• Platform Engineering
• SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
• DevOps
• Automation
• Observability
• Telemetry
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Configuration Compliance