Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Redmond, WA +1 · Software Engineering

This role is for a Principal Engineer on a new Platform Engineering team building an AI-first internal developer platform. The platform will empower other engineering teams to ship faster and safer by providing golden paths, templates, and shared capabilities, with a focus on agent-driven workflows and codegen tooling. The role involves designing and building agent and codegen tooling to automate service creation and migration, and owning these capabilities in production.

What you'd actually do

  1. Work with platform and product teams to turn developer pain points into golden paths, templates, and shared capabilities they'll adopt.
  2. Lead the design of a capability area or agent workstream that several teams depend on: the dependencies, the interfaces, the design docs, and maintainable code others build on.
  3. Build and operate the agent and codegen tooling that wires new and existing services onto the foundation (identity, secrets, observability, safe deployment) by default.
  4. Own what you ship in production, including on-call. Watch for regressions, config drift, and integration failures, and fix them.
  5. Keep raising availability, reliability, observability, and performance, and bring what you learn back to the team.

Skills

Required

  • production systems you've built and run at scale
  • AI-native
  • shipped real production software built with generative AI and agents
  • judgment to direct them
  • Depth in one of identity, secrets and config, observability, or CI/CD and safe deployment
  • working knowledge of the others
  • Cloud-native experience
  • fluency in one or more of C#/.NET, TypeScript, or Python
  • bias for action
  • comfort owning things end to end when the path isn't defined yet
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python — OR equivalent experience.
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements
  • Microsoft Cloud Background Check

Nice to have

  • Azure a plus
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience, OR Bachelor's Degree AND 10+ years — OR equivalent experience.
  • Deep experience in one or more of identity, secrets/config, observability, or CI/CD and safe deployment.
  • Azure and modern .NET, or comparable cloud-native stacks.
  • Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build production software.
  • Experience building internal developer platforms, paved roads, CI/CD systems, or cloud infrastructure at scale.

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-native
  • shipped real production software built with generative AI and agents
  • judgment to direct them
  • 0->1 build
  • agent-driven workflows
  • agent can carry that ambiguous, cross-system work
  • agents can carry that ambiguous, cross-system work

Other signals

  • AI-first developer platform
  • agent-driven workflows
  • build from scratch
  • 0->1 build