Senior Software Engineer

People & Work Intelligence (PWI) is building the intelligence layer that helps Microsoft 365 understand the work people do, the skills they possess, and how AI can accelerate workforce transformation. Our platform powers experiences across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Workforce Intelligence, Learning, Skills, Tasks, and organizational insights, enabling AI-driven decision making for individuals, managers, and enterprise leaders.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build and evolve PWI’s intelligence, inferencing, platform, and AI-powered systems.

This role is ideal for a solid, hands-on engineer who enjoys solving complex engineering problems, building reliable distributed systems, and applying modern AI technologies to real-world product scenarios. You will work on systems that process signals from Microsoft 365, generate meaningful intelligence, and power experiences across Copilot and People & Work Intelligence.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own significant components and technical areas from design through production. You will collaborate closely with engineering, product management, data science, research, and partner teams to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable, secure, and reliable solutions.

Success in this role requires solid engineering fundamentals, experience building production services, sound technical judgment, and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams. You will also contribute to engineering quality, mentor other engineers, participate in design reviews, and help the team adopt modern AI-first engineering practices.

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.

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate scalable services and platform components for People & Work Intelligence.
• Own the design and implementation of distributed systems supporting skills intelligence, work intelligence, inferencing, analytics, and Copilot experiences.
• Build AI-powered solutions using technologies such as LLMs, retrieval systems, agent frameworks, knowledge graphs, and intelligence pipelines.
• Develop systems for signal processing, enrichment, contextual intelligence, recommendations, and enterprise-scale insight generation.
• Work closely with product managers, data scientists, researchers, and engineers to translate customer and product requirements into well-designed technical solutions.
• Contribute to architecture and technical design decisions, including API design, data models, scalability, reliability, security, privacy, and operational considerations.
• Drive engineering projects involving platform modernization, reliability, performance optimization, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Apply solid engineering practices across observability, testing, deployment automation, monitoring, incident prevention, and service health.
• Participate actively in design and code reviews and help improve engineering quality across the team.
• Mentor and support other engineers through technical guidance, knowledge sharing, code reviews, debugging, and collaborative problem solving.
• Take ownership of ambiguous engineering problems, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and drive solutions from initial design through production rollout.
• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce operational overhead, improve developer productivity, and appropriately apply AI-assisted engineering.
• Collaborate effectively with partner teams across Microsoft to deliver end-to-end capabilities that power Microsoft 365 experiences.
• Contribute to a culture of customer focus, engineering excellence, accountability, continuous learning, and innovation.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and operating production software systems.
• Solid programming experience with C#, Java, Python, or comparable modern programming languages.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, software design principles, API design, and distributed systems.
• Experience designing and building cloud-based services, APIs, platform components, or data-intensive systems.
• Experience delivering reliable production systems with consideration for scalability, performance, availability, observability, security, and operational excellence.
• Experience with or solid interest in AI/ML systems, LLM-based applications, RAG, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, or other intelligent systems.
• Proven ability to independently own technically complex components or projects from design through implementation and production.
• Solid debugging and problem-solving skills, particularly for distributed and production systems.
• Solid communication and collaboration skills with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, data science, research, and partner teams.
• Experience building distributed or cloud services that operate at enterprise scale.
• Experience with LLM applications, agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, retrieval pipelines, knowledge graphs, or AI/ML platforms.
• Experience working with high-volume data processing, signal processing, recommendations, inferencing, analytics, or contextual intelligence systems.
• Experience designing APIs, asynchronous processing systems, data pipelines, caching strategies, or other scalable backend architectures.
• Solid understanding of service reliability, observability, monitoring, deployment automation, security, privacy, and production operations.
• Ability to take an ambiguous product or technical problem, break it into well-defined engineering problems, and drive the implementation to completion.
• Ability to make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs across quality, velocity, reliability, performance, security, privacy, and cost.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with and influence engineers and partner teams through technical expertise, design discussions, and clear communication.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
• Customer-focused mindset with an ability to connect engineering decisions to product and customer outcomes.
• Growth mindset and enthusiasm for learning and applying emerging AI technologies.
• Interest in using AI-assisted development tools and techniques to improve engineering productivity and software quality.

#CAPIDC

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.