Join the Microsoft Garage Team building Innovation Studio, a Teams-integrated product that helps organizations run high-impact hackathons, accelerate ideas, and turn employee creativity into measurable business outcomes. You will help shape a product that combines modern web experiences, Azure-native services, agentic AI workflows, and deep integration with Microsoft first-party tools.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the architecture and delivery of product capabilities across React, Azure Functions, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Azure AI Foundry, secure identity, data workflows, and agent orchestration. You will also help define how our team uses agentic development itself: multi-agent workflows, AI-assisted planning, implementation, review, validation, documentation, and the tooling that makes those workflows reliable.
You will have opportunities to work on emerging patterns in agentic software engineering, enterprise-grade AI orchestration, Teams app development, GitHub and Azure integration, and future integrations with additional Microsoft first-party tools.
At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.
Responsibilities
- AI-Native Development: Creates new artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices to improve stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) including requirements capture, design, implementation, validation, deployment, and operations.
- Design: Oversees and establishes procedures around taking on dependencies for a critically important and high-impact space such as a connection with deep technical domains or for a broad set of products or services at critical junctures (e.g., early in development, urgent time horizon).
- Understand User Requirements: Partners with and influences appropriate internal (e.g., product manager, privacy/security subject matter expert, technical lead) and external (e.g. customer escalation team, public forums) senior stakeholders to set the product strategy for services or products of high importance.
- Coding: Establishes, influences, and ensures policies and procedures for developing extensible, reusable, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code that adheres to design specifications, identifying and addressing coding issues, and conducting effective code reviews.
- Engineering Excellence: Oversees and provides technical leadership and subject matter expertise through efforts to ensure that compliance requirements are updated and clear.
Qualifications
Required 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
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience.
- Experience designing agent orchestration systems, tool-using AI agents, prompt and instruction frameworks, retrieval patterns, evaluations, or responsible AI guardrails.
- Experience with Microsoft Azure services such as Azure AI Foundry, Azure Functions, Storage, Key Vault, Managed Identity, Application Insights, or infrastructure as code.
- Experience integrating with GitHub, Azure DevOps, CI/CD systems, code review workflows, issue tracking, or engineering productivity platforms.
- Experience improving service reliability through observability, automated testing, performance analysis, deployment automation, and incident response.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex technical problems, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and influence architecture across teams.
- Passion for building tools that help people collaborate, experiment, learn, and turn ideas into practical outcomes.
#Research
Software 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.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field
- 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience
- Experience designing agent orchestration systems, tool-using AI agents, prompt and instruction frameworks, retrieval patterns, evaluations, or responsible AI guardrails
- Experience with Microsoft Azure services such as Azure AI Foundry, Azure Functions, Storage, Key Vault, Managed Identity, Application Insights, or infrastructure as code
- Experience integrating with GitHub, Azure DevOps, CI/CD systems, code review workflows, issue tracking, or engineering productivity platforms
- Experience improving service reliability through observability, automated testing, performance analysis, deployment automation, and incident response
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex technical problems, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and influence architecture across teams
- Passion for building tools that help people collaborate, experiment, learn, and turn ideas into practical outcomes
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.
Microsoft Insights
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.
