The Role
Architects and builds production agentic AI systems for Azure customer support, including LLM orchestration, multi-agent workflows, RAG, tool integrations, evaluation frameworks, and secure AI services. Writes production C# and Python, owns technical delivery and reliability, establishes engineering standards, leads architecture decisions, responds to incidents, mentors engineers, and influences cross-team product and platform roadmaps.
Summary Generated by Built In
Overview
Responsibilities
Qualifications
Are you a customer-obsessed software engineer and technical architect who is passionate about applying AI to complex, real-world problems? The Engineering Operations (EngOps) team's mission is to transform Microsoft Cloud customers into fans. Through our deep engineering engagements with customers and teams across Microsoft, we analyze and amplify customer needs and drive the vision to improve cloud quality, security, and reliability. Our culture of growth mindset and empowerment is central to who we are and how we work.
Our ACES CODE engineering team is building domain-specific agents and services that are fundamentally transforming Azure customer support, moving from reactive, human-only workflows to AI-first systems that resolve customer issues at Azure scale. We are seeking a Principal Applied AI Engineer to serve as a hands-on technical architect and senior developer for production agentic AI services.
You will define and implement the architecture for next-generation AI agents, including LLM orchestration, multi-agent coordination, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool integration, and evaluation systems. You will write production code, lead complex technical initiatives, establish engineering standards, and guide engineers across organizational boundaries through technical influence rather than people management.
This is a deeply technical individual contributor role with broad architectural scope and direct accountability for production outcomes. You will turn ambiguous customer and business problems into scalable systems, make critical design decisions, build foundational components, and help teams ship secure and reliable AI services that handle thousands of customer cases per month.
Every day, our customers stake their business and reputation on our cloud. You can help Azure EngOps provide our customers with the world-class cloud services they need to succeed.
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.
Responsibilities
'• Architect and build production agentic AI systems: Design and implement scalable AI agents and services, including LLM orchestration, multi-agent workflows, RAG pipelines, tool integrations, memory and state management, and human-in-the-loop experiences.
• Lead through hands-on engineering: Write, review, and maintain production-quality C# and Python code. Build critical components, reference implementations, prototypes, and reusable platform capabilities that accelerate delivery across the engineering organization.
• Own end-to-end technical delivery: Translate ambiguous customer support scenarios into clear technical requirements and take solutions from architecture and experimentation through implementation, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.
• Define technical architecture and engineering standards: Establish architecture patterns, API and data contracts, code quality expectations, evaluation practices, deployment strategies, and observability standards for AI services. Drive technical consistency while allowing teams to evolve their solutions.
• Advance evaluation-driven AI development: Design and implement evaluation frameworks using rubrics, golden datasets, simulation, judge models, and offline and online evaluation. Define quality thresholds and graduation criteria for moving agents from experimentation through shadow mode and into autonomous operation.
• Own production quality and reliability: Ensure AI services meet demanding standards for correctness, availability, latency, scalability, cost, and safety. Diagnose complex production issues, lead technical incident response and root cause analysis, and engineer systemic improvements.
• Design for responsible and secure AI: Embed responsible AI principles, privacy protections, prompt-injection defenses, tool authorization, data boundaries, action controls, auditability, and fail-safe behavior into system architecture and implementation.
• Make consequential technical decisions: Evaluate models, frameworks, platforms, and architectural approaches using evidence from experiments and production telemetry. Balance solution quality with reliability, maintainability, latency, cost, and operational complexity.
• Influence product and platform roadmaps: Partner with product managers, researchers, platform engineers, and Azure service teams to shape technical strategy and platform capabilities. Translate customer support patterns and operational signals into durable engineering investments.
• Drive measurable customer and business impact: Instrument systems and use data to improve automation accuracy, case volume reduction, resolution time, engineering efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Connect architectural investments to measurable outcomes.
• Provide technical leadership across teams: Lead architecture reviews, resolve complex technical disagreements, and align engineers and partner organizations around shared designs. Communicate clearly with engineering teams, senior leaders, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Raise the engineering capability of the organization: Mentor engineers in system design, software engineering, applied AI, and evaluation-driven development. Create reusable guidance and help teams develop the judgment to determine where AI agents should and should not act autonomously.
Qualifications
Basic 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.
Preferred Qualifications
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Strong proficiency in C# and/or Python, with demonstrated ability to design and implement production-quality services and distributed systems.
• Experience with applied AI systems, including LLM-based applications, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks, or machine learning services.
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Azure, and cloud-native engineering practices including microservices, APIs, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and align multiple teams without direct management authority.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Experience implementing agent security patterns such as prompt-injection defense, identity propagation, least-privilege tool access, data-boundary enforcement, approval gates, and auditable actions.
• Demonstrated ability to move between strategic architecture and detailed implementation, including debugging complex interactions across models, prompts, tools, data, and distributed services.
• Strong business acumen and experience connecting technical investments to measurable customer outcomes such as case volume reduction, resolution time, automation quality, and customer satisfaction.
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams without formal people management responsibilities.
• Background in customer support engineering, supportability, diagnostics, or customer experience platforms is a strong plus.
#EngOps #EngOpsACES
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production software systems
- Strong proficiency in C# and/or Python
- Experience designing and implementing production-quality services and distributed systems
- Experience with applied AI systems, including LLM applications, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks, or machine learning services
- Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Azure, and cloud-native practices including microservices, APIs, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability
- Ability to influence technical direction and align multiple teams without direct management authority
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field
- Experience implementing agent security patterns such as prompt-injection defense, identity propagation, least-privilege tool access, data-boundary enforcement, approval gates, and auditable actions
- Ability to move between strategic architecture and detailed implementation, including debugging complex interactions across models, prompts, tools, data, and distributed services
- Strong business acumen and experience connecting technical investments to measurable customer outcomes
- Track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards without formal people management responsibilities
- Background in customer support engineering, supportability, diagnostics, or customer experience platforms
Microsoft Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Microsoft and has not been reviewed or approved by Microsoft.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is presented as broadly competitive overall, with clear role/level/location variation and an emphasis on using posted ranges and band information for apples-to-apples comparisons.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are described as a standout, highlighted by a strong 401(k) match structure and immediate vesting, plus additional plan features for tax-advantaged saving.
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Parental & Family Support — Family-oriented benefits are portrayed as a meaningful strength, with substantial paid parental leave and added supports like back-up care and adoption/surrogacy assistance.
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The Company
What We Do
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.
