Microsoft Substrate is the foundational cloud platform that powers many of Microsoft’s most critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot, providing shared infrastructure, identity, messaging, storage, and service-to-service capabilities used across Microsoft 365 and related cloud offerings. Substrate services operate at global scale and are designed to deliver high availability, reliability, and security for some of the world’s most demanding workloads.
As a Site Reliability Engineer II, you will take ownership of reliability and operational outcomes for specific components or services. You will independently diagnose and resolve production issues, design and implement automation to reduce toil, and contribute to service improvements that enhance availability, scalability, and efficiency.
This role requires deeper technical judgment, stronger software engineering fundamentals, and close collaboration with partner teams to ensure reliability, diagnosability, security, and compliance are built into services from design through operation—particularly for services operating in highly-regulated environments.
Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Growth mindset encourages each of us to lean in and learn what matters most to our customers, to create the foundational knowledge that enables us to make customer-first decisions in everything we do. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.
Responsibilities
Own reliability and operational health for one or more Substrate components or services in highly regulated environments.
Serve as an actively engaged on-call engineer (OCE), participating in an on-call rotation and independently responding to incidents for owned services.
Respond to, diagnose, and resolve production incidents with minimal supervision.
Design and implement automation to reduce operational toil and improve service stability.
Write and maintain production-quality code and automation that improves reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
Develop and maintain monitoring, alerting, and telemetry to support SLOs and operational metrics.
Lead post-incident reviews for owned incidents, focusing on root cause analysis and durable fixes.
Collaborate with software engineering teams to embed reliability and operability into service design.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 1+ year(s) technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.
These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter
Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance
- 2+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
- Experience operating or supporting services in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.
Site Reliability Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $102,100 - $202,200 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 $133,800 - $219,200 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
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field plus at least 1 year of technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration, or equivalent experience.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field plus at least 2 years of technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration, or equivalent experience.
- Active U.S. Government Secret security clearance.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and government security screening requirements.
- U.S. citizenship verification due to citizenship-based legal restrictions.
- Pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
- At least 2 years of technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
- Experience operating or supporting services in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.
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.
