Senior Software Engineer

Join the Microsoft 365 Core Data Access team in Redmond, the Bay Area, or New York as a Senior Software Engineer building the query, blob, and data-access services behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

Microsoft's Substrate is a large-scale cloud platform that underpins Microsoft 365. It supports productivity, collaboration, and AI experiences for businesses, educational institutions, governments, and individuals worldwide. Our team builds the services and libraries that connect Microsoft 365 applications, including Microsoft 365 Search and Copilot, to data in Substrate. Our work spans distributed services, gRPC and other service APIs, and client libraries in C# and Rust, with performance, reliability, security, privacy, and developer experience at the heart of our engineering decisions.

We are looking for an engineer who enjoys solving distributed systems problems and building software that other engineers depend on. In this individual contributor role, you will own features and components from design through production, make thoughtful technical trade-offs, and collaborate with partner teams to turn complex requirements into maintainable solutions. You will combine hands-on development with technical leadership through design reviews, mentoring, and improvements to engineering practices.

You will join a collaborative team that values curiosity, accountability, and continuous learning. We share knowledge, welcome different perspectives, and use production data and customer feedback to guide our decisions. This role offers the opportunity to deepen your expertise in large-scale systems while improving the platforms behind Microsoft 365 experiences.

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.

• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and partner teams to understand customer needs and translate them into clear technical requirements.
• Lead the technical design and delivery of components across the team's data-access services: a query service that runs across sharded Microsoft 365 data, a blob service, and a gRPC service that exposes the core mailbox store. Evaluate trade-offs, identify dependencies and risks, and document decisions.
• Write, test, review, and maintain high-quality code, with attention to correctness, performance, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Design and evolve service APIs, including gRPC APIs, and C# and Rust client libraries that partner teams can adopt easily. Work with those teams to integrate them successfully.
• Own the production health of your components through monitoring, safe deployments, and participation in the on-call rotation. Diagnose incidents, address root causes, and improve operational readiness.
• Use telemetry, profiling, and customer feedback to identify and deliver improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, and resource efficiency.
• Mentor engineers, provide constructive code and design reviews, and share knowledge to strengthen the team's engineering practices and technical judgment.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.