Principal Cloud Network Engineer

Microsoft is building AI infrastructure at an unprecedented pace, and every new GPU cluster puts more demand on our wide area network. To scale the network 10x, we're hiring a Principal Cloud Network Engineer to provide expert technical leadership at the intersection of large-scale networking, network validation, live-site operations, software engineering, and AI. You'll shape the strategy and architecture for how network operating systems, features, configurations, and operational workflows are tested, deployed, monitored, and continuously improved across a global, multi-vendor environment
The successful candidate will own complex problem and solution spaces that span teams and engineering disciplines. They will define technical direction, establish durable engineering standards, lead high-consequence design decisions, and convert recurring operational pain into secure, measurable, and scalable systems. A central expectation is to accelerate the team’s AI engineering maturity by building practical AI-assisted and agentic capabilities, along with the evaluation, safety, observability, and human-oversight mechanisms required for production use.

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. We build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

• Define and lead end-to-end network validation strategies across network operating systems, routing features, hardware platforms, configurations, and automation services, covering unit, integration, virtual lab, physical lab, canary, and production environments.
• Architect extensible, vendor-agnostic testing frameworks to validate control-plane convergence, data-plane behavior, failure recovery, scalability, performance, interoperability, upgrade and downgrade safety, and platform stability across multi-vendor networks.
• Establish risk-based quality standards and release-readiness criteria, including test coverage, quality gates, regression requirements, reproducible lab environments, and reusable tests and safeguards derived from production incidents and defects.
• Provide technical leadership for complex network failures and live-site incidents, using telemetry, packet captures, logs, protocol state, topology, and hardware signals to isolate issues, identify systemic failure patterns, and drive corrective actions.
• Define and improve network operational readiness and reliability, including telemetry, alerting, service-level indicators, troubleshooting, rollback, post-deployment validation, capacity analysis, self-healing mechanisms, and secure escalation processes.
• Architect and build network automation and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems, including source of truth, intent and metadata as code, automated validation, progressive deployment, health gates, rollback, drift detection, reconciliation, and operational automation.
• Provide technical leadership across teams, driving high-impact architectural decisions, aligning engineering, operations, security, and vendor stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and establishing standards for code quality, observability, testing, documentation, configuration management, and service ownership.
• Define and execute an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for network engineering, applying AI capabilities to improve engineering efficiency, network operations, troubleshooting, automation, reliability, and measurable operational outcomes.

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation
  • OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• 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:

• Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation
  • OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation 
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in network design, development, and automation
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years experience delivering network designs into production and experience with live site accountability for a network.
• 1+ year(s) experience developing quality management programs.

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Cloud Network Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.