Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the long-range architecture of the MMS platform: the OpenRTB request hot path, auction engines (best-price, priority, dynamic reserve price, multi-placement), bidder adapter framework, and the experimentation/flights system.
• Drive cross-team technical strategy with peer principals across Microsoft Advertising — bidders, supply integrations, brand safety, identity, measurement, and billing.
• Set and enforce engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, technical RFCs, and mentorship of senior and staff-level engineers.
• Identify and resolve systemic risks across reliability, latency, cost, and correctness before they reach production.
• Design and build highly scalable Go services on the MMS platform, with strict latency and availability SLAs measured in single-digit milliseconds and five nines.
• Evolve the bidder adapter framework to support new supply types (display, native, video) and new integration patterns (server-side header bidding, deal-based, programmatic guaranteed).
• Improve the auction subsystem — pricing, filtration (L1 brand safety, IP blocks, embargoes), bidder selection, and response shaping — with measurable revenue and quality impact.
• Strengthen the experimentation framework (flights, traffic sub-groups) so PMs and data science can ship A/B tests safely at high cadence.
• Improve observability of the request path: structured Event Hub logging, sampling strategies, metrics, and tracing across the bidder fan-out.
• Infrastructure & Cloud
• Drive Azure-native deployment and operational excellence across AKS, ACR, Azure Key Vault, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure AD.
• Led initiatives to reduce cost-per-request, improve cold-start and config-reload behavior, and harden cross-region failover.
• Improve CI/CD on Azure DevOps, including canary, progressive rollout, and automated rollback strategies.
• Org-Wide Impact
• Lead initiatives that make delivery of high-quality software routine and efficient across the full SDLC — from inception and technical design through testing, deployment, and oncall.
• Contribute to runbooks, deployment documentation, and oncall readiness.
• Lead efforts to raise the bar on incident response and institutionalize effective post-incident learning.
• Leverage AI dev tools across the software development lifecycle to raise team-wide engineering productivity.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience building and operating latency-sensitive backend services with strict SLA requirements (P99 measured in milliseconds, five-nines availability).
• Go — deep production experience, including profiling, GC tuning, concurrency patterns, and performance-sensitive code on the request hot path.
• OpenRTB / programmatic advertising — hands-on experience with header bidding, real-time bidding, mediation, exchanges, SSPs/DSPs, brand safety, or identity/cookie syncing. Familiarity with Prebid Server or similar auction platforms.
• Auction systems — experience designing or evolving pricing logic, bidder filtration, dynamic reserve pricing, or floor-price optimization at scale.
• Kubernetes & Azure — production experience with AKS, ACR, Azure Key Vault, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Application Insights, and Azure DevOps; comfortable with multi-region, multi-cluster deployments.
• Distributed systems — solid grasp of consistency trade-offs, fault tolerance, distributed caching, and cross-region replication patterns.
• Experimentation platforms — experience designing or scaling A/B testing frameworks, feature flags, or controlled rollout systems.
• Observability — experience with structured logging, high-cardinality metrics, sampling at scale, and event streaming pipelines (Event Hubs, Kafka, Kusto/ADX).
• Proven record of mentoring senior engineers and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
• Solid problem-solving skills with a focus on reliability, observability, and system design.