Principal Software Engineer

Overview: Windows + Devices powers experiences for over a billion users worldwide. The Windows Engineering System team enables Windows engineers to design, build, validate, and ship at scale—securely and with high quality. The Quality & Validation team builds engineering systems and delivers quality and validation services used by all Windows products. We develop and manage scalable software services that leverage automation, agentic tooling, and standards to serve our Windows partner teams.

Responsibilities

• Partner with PMs, tech leads, and stakeholders to determine user requirements, leveraging continuous feedback loops and customer usage insights to inform design and solution quality.
• Lead architectural discussions, create design proposals, and make high‑confidence design decisions that consider security, compliance, performance, and future scalability.
• Identify cross‑team dependencies and coordinate across teams to ensure coherent systems, optimized performance, and reliable integration paths.
• Write, review, and maintain high‑quality, extensible, and maintainable code; mentor others in best practices and coding patterns.
• Lead debugging initiatives using telemetry, logs, and diagnostics to identify root causes and resolve complex issues effectively.
• Drive project and release planning by breaking long‑term vision into actionable milestones and guiding estimation and execution across teams.
• Lead experimentation, validation, and data‑informed decision‑making to ensure solutions meet customer value metrics.
• Serve as a DRI, leading incident response, building playbooks, mentoring others on operational excellence, and driving efforts to reduce incident volume across services.
• Integrate telemetry and observability frameworks, drive feedback loops, and ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and cost‑efficient.
• Lead improvements to engineering tools, automation, and workflows; champion security, privacy, accessibility, and compliance standards across teams.
• Stay current on emerging technologies, share knowledge, and promote consistency in engineering methodologies at scale.
• Act as a key contact for partner engineering teams across Microsoft (e.g., Xbox, Office) to ensure consistent user experiences and alignment on technical direction.
• Lead conflict resolution across teams, ensuring aligned priorities and smooth execution across interdependent systems.
• Model Microsoft’s culture of respect, integrity, and accountability, contributing to an inclusive environment and mentoring others on growth‑mindset behaviors.

Qualifications

Required / Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline.
• 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, PowerShell, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud background check.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 8+ years of 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 of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Experience building and shipping production‑grade software or services.
• Track record of designing, deploying, and operating large‑scale services with high availability.
• Postmortem analysis and authoring for live site issues.
• Experience with build systems and validation systems for hardware, software, and cloud services.

Pay

Software Engineering IC5 – typical base pay range across the U.S.: USD $142,800 – $274,800 per year. In the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, the base pay range is USD $188,000 – $304,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for additional benefits and compensation.