What if you could write code that transforms how an entire organization delivers and operates cloud services? As a Software Engineer on the M365 Air Gapped Clouds team, you'll build internal tools, implement agentic workflows, and develop software solutions that accelerate delivery and improve the efficiency of M365 operations in sovereign environments. If you're excited about coding solutions that have immediate, measurable impact on how critical government customers work, this is the role for you.
M365 Air Gapped Clouds builds and delivers the complete Microsoft 365 portfolio in government cloud environments - Exchange, Office 365, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Purview, and Copilot. You will write and ship code across backend services that enables feature delivery and platform evolution. We invest in our people through a culture of growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, and inclusion, giving you the space to learn, take ownership, and make a real impact.
The Substrate & Security team builds the foundation that every M365 service depends on in government clouds. We develop software and tooling behind nearly every customer interaction across core search services, Copilot capabilities, infrastructure orchestration, and the protocols that connect users to their data. We also build and maintain authentication and security components that protect some of the most sensitive workloads in the world. Join us to deliver the secure, scalable platform that powers M365.
The right candidate for this job is:
• Committed to exceptional customer satisfaction through service ownership, including 24/7 on-call live-site incident response.
• Focused on writing high‑quality, maintainable code and motivated to continuously improve development, integration, and deployment processes through automation.
• Experienced with distributed systems and highly scalable services.
• A self-starter who thrives in a bottoms-up, fast-paced, and highly technical environment.
• A continuous learner who enjoys new technological challenges and is motivated to solve them through engineering excellence and innovation.
• An effective collaborator, experienced in creating technical partnerships across teams.
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.
Qualifications
• Acts as a designated responsible individual (DRI) in monitoring a system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions for simple problems, and recommends actions to restore system/product/service by following the playbook. Escalates more complex problems to other DRIs as to status. Responds within service level agreement (SLA) timeframe. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.
• Contributes to operations of live site service with direct supervision, following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Identifies solutions and mitigations to simple issues impacting performance or functionality of live site services and escalates appropriately.
• Supports the identification of dependencies, and their incorporation into the development of design documents for a product feature with oversight. Learns and helps to actively identify other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others.
• Reviews current developments and proactively seeks new knowledge that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale. Develops collateral materials for learning and literary sessions used to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge), with some oversight.
• Contributes in partnership with appropriate internal stakeholders (e.g., product manager, privacy/security subject matter expert, technical lead) to understand customer/user requirements for a feature. Contributes to incorporating customer insights into solution fixes with oversight from more experienced peers.
Software 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
- Learn and implement maintainable, extensible code for products, services, or features using coding patterns and best practices.
- Monitor systems and respond to degradation, downtime, or service interruptions according to playbooks and SLAs.
- Participate in rotational live-site operations and on-call incident response while following security best practices.
- Identify system dependencies and contribute to technical design documents.
- Improve product availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance through engineering and monitoring practices.
- Collaborate with product managers, security specialists, technical leads, and internal stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver solutions.
- Experience with distributed systems and highly scalable services.
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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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage is described as comprehensive, with U.S. plans covering preventive care at 100% and limiting annual out-of-pocket costs. Mental-health counseling, employee assistance, and wellbeing resources are also emphasized.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave, family-caregiver leave, childcare assistance, and family concierge services are highlighted as core elements. These supports are presented alongside parenting and family-planning resources.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Vacation, holidays, and flexible work schedules are emphasized, with generous time-away policies noted. Leave options extend beyond standard vacation to include caregiver and parental programs.
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.







