Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers to levels they cannot achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, and more openness in a cloud-enabled world. The Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization powers mission-critical Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 services, including Business Chat, Work IQ, Agent 365, and the agent runtime for the next era of work. Together, we are building the platform that will power Microsoft’s AI experiences for decades to come.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our team!
This is an exciting time to join our group and work on products that are highly strategic to Microsoft. Microsoft Agent 365 provides a centralized control plane that enables organizations to observe, govern, and secure AI agents across their enterprise. Dataverse is a proven data platform for securely storing and managing business data at scale, trusted by enterprise customers around the world.
Our team builds the globally distributed services that manage, protect, and optimize the SQL database fleet and compute resources underpinning Dataverse. You will help define the future of this platform and work alongside engineers who thrive on solving complex problems at global scale while maintaining uncompromising standards for quality, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
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
As a Principal Software Engineer in the Microsoft Dataverse team, you will define and drive the technical strategy for intelligent, autonomous, and globally distributed services that power Dataverse. You will lead through influence, remain hands-on in critical technical areas, raise engineering standards, and partner across disciplines and organizations to deliver durable customer and business outcomes.
Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for services that manage and optimize Dataverse’s globally distributed database fleet. Translate that strategy into executable roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
Demonstrate strong end-to-end ownership of critical technical areas—from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, operational health, and long-term evolution. Proactively identify gaps, drive issues to closure, and remain accountable for customer and business outcomes.
Create clarity in complex and ambiguous engineering spaces by framing problems, gathering and analyzing data, identifying root causes, evaluating tradeoffs, and converting insights into coherent technical strategies and concrete deliverables.
Lead complex initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations. Align stakeholders, resolve architectural disagreements, establish clear system boundaries and invariants, and manage dependencies across database, service, infrastructure, security, and compliance domains.
Effectively manage competing priorities, balancing strategic engineering investments, customer commitments, live-site issues, technical debt, and operational responsibilities while maintaining high standards for quality and execution.
Own quality, security, compliance, reliability, and operability by design. Establish automation and engineering practices for validation, safe deployment and rollback, observability, capacity management, incident response, and continuous improvement of mission-critical services.
Multiply the effectiveness of the engineering organization by mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture and code, establishing reusable patterns, simplifying systems, and raising the bar for engineering excellence. Define and validate security, reliability, and correctness invariants for both new and existing systems.
Embody our culture and values. As a team working openly, collaboratively, and relentlessly towards a shared goal, we can achieve much more than we can imagine.
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.
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:
- Master'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, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
- Experience architecting and delivering large-scale production cloud services, including providing technical leadership across multiple teams and managing complex cross-organizational dependencies.
- Experience with SQL and enterprise-grade relational database systems, including database administration, query and workload optimization, capacity and resource management, reliability engineering, and automation at fleet scale.
- Experience designing, building, and troubleshooting scalable, resilient, event-driven systems, including asynchronous processing, failure recovery, observability, controlled flighting, and resource optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, set technical direction, build alignment, and influence architecture and execution across organizational boundaries without direct authority.
- Demonstrated end-to-end ownership from requirements through production deployment, including diagnosing complex cross-service failures using logs, telemetry, correlation IDs, and distributed traces, supported by comprehensive unit, integration, functional, and end-to-end testing strategies.
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 a related technical field, or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, or similar languages
- Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter
- Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or bachelor's degree and 12+ years of experience, or equivalent experience
- Experience architecting and delivering large-scale production cloud services
- Experience providing technical leadership across multiple teams and managing cross-organizational dependencies
- Experience with SQL and enterprise-grade relational database systems, including administration, query and workload optimization, capacity management, reliability engineering, and fleet-scale automation
- Experience designing, building, and troubleshooting scalable, resilient, event-driven systems
- Ability to create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, set technical direction, build alignment, and influence architecture without direct authority
- End-to-end ownership from requirements through production deployment, including diagnosing cross-service failures using logs, telemetry, correlation IDs, and distributed traces
- Experience with comprehensive unit, integration, functional, and end-to-end testing strategies
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.
