Software Engineer II

Overview

The Azure Compute team at Microsoft is seeking a passionate and experienced Software Engineer II to join the VMScaleSet (VMSS) platform team. This team is responsible for building and evolving the foundational infrastructure that powers Azure’s scalable compute offerings. You will work on mission-critical systems that enable customers to deploy, manage, and scale thousands of virtual machines with high availability and performance.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

This is a U.S. based position. While remote work is possible, relocation is not provided for the role.

Responsibilities

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• 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.

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science OR related technical field AND 4+ 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 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 1+ years of experience building, deploying, or operating AI‑powered automation or agents, including use of LLMs, rule‑based systems, or hybrid approaches to automate operational workflows.
• 1+ years of experience designing or operating systems with strong reliability, security, or safety guarantees, such as validation layers, guardrails, failure handling, or observability in production environments.

Key skills/competency

• Azure Compute
• VMScaleSet (VMSS)
• Scalable Infrastructure
• Cloud Computing
• High Availability
• Distributed Systems
• C/C++/C#/Java/Python
• System Design
• Automation (AI/LLMs)
• Mentorship