Overview
Microsoft 365 and Copilot run on Substrate & Work IQ (SWIQ) — the trusted data and intelligence platform behind Microsoft 365. In plain terms, SWIQ is the secure foundation that lets AI understand the context of real work — people, documents, meetings, and business processes — and act on it safely, while keeping enterprise permissions, security, and compliance intact. It is what makes Microsoft 365 Copilot and the coming wave of AI agents useful and trustworthy for hundreds of millions of people. Inside SWIQ sits OIC — Observability & Intelligent Cloud — the team responsible for keeping one of the world’s largest and most complex SaaS estates, Microsoft Exchange and Copilot, healthy in real time. OIC watches the signals these services emit, detects trouble before customers feel it, diagnoses what is actually wrong, and drives the fastest possible path to mitigation.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our team. As a delivering Principal, you will personally prototype the next generation of customer experiences across the full incident lifecycle — Signals, Detection, Diagnosis, Mitigation, and the Incident experience — putting agentic AI to work on real operational problems and getting the earliest hands on Microsoft’s newest AI technologies.
You will operate at the center of an established, international engineering team of more than 100 people, setting technical direction not by authority but by influence — earning the trust of peer Principal leaders and pulling the organization forward through what you ship. This is a big-data role at its core: you will mine vast existing telemetry systems and invent entirely new telemetry designed for AIOps rather than inherited from human dashboards. You will apply classic AI/ML to separate genuinely concerning signals from an ocean of noise, then invent the systems that discover context around those signals — explaining not just that something is aberrant, but why, and what it means. And you will lead the harder cultural change: getting a large, careful organization comfortable letting LLM-based systems lead the diagnosis and mitigation of live incidents, methodically reducing the role of the human in traditionally human-in-the-loop practices until the machine is doing the work and the human is verifying, not driving.
We are looking for an inventor — someone with a track record of seeing where the field is going before it arrives, and preparing their organization to be there first. The next phase of operations is not about adding more tools; it is about building a system that thinks. Imagine an incident that detects itself, explains itself, mitigates itself, and files its own retrospective — while an on-call engineer sleeps. Imagine telemetry that is designed to be reasoned over by models, not just read by people. Imagine an operations practice where “human-in-the-loop” gradually becomes “human-on-the-loop,” and then simply “human-informed.” That is the space you will define. If you are energized by ambiguous, high-stakes, first-of-their-kind problems — by proving what is possible at planetary scale and then making it the new normal — this is a rare seat at the frontier of agentic AI doing real work.
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.
Responsibilities
- Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for one or more complex scenarios.
- Provides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
- Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company.
- Leverages deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items.
- Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
- Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.
Other Requirements:
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred Qualifications:
Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
Distributed systems depth: Deep, hands-on expertise designing and shipping large-scale distributed systems, cloud services, or data platforms in production.
Applied AI/ML: Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML — including modern LLM-based approaches — to real production problems, from prototype through delivery.
Telemetry & big data: Proven ability to work with large-scale telemetry, observability, or big-data pipelines (metrics, logs, traces, time-series, anomaly detection).
Delivery-led influence: A track record of leading through delivery and technical influence across teams and organizational boundaries, without relying on formal authority.
AIOps & incident systems: Experience building AIOps, incident management, monitoring/detection, root-cause diagnosis, or automated mitigation systems for high-scale services.
Telemetry for machines: Experience designing telemetry and instrumentation intended to be consumed by ML/LLM systems, not only by human operators.
Agentic AI patterns: Familiarity with agentic AI patterns — planning, tool use, and autonomous or semi-autonomous action in production workflows.
Foresight: A history of anticipating industry and technology shifts and repositioning an organization to capitalize on them ahead of peers.
#Foundation
Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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.**