Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Zürich, ZH, Switzerland · Software Engineering

Principal Software Engineer role within Microsoft's Industry Solutions Engineering (ISE) team, focused on co-engineering AI-powered, cloud-based solutions with customers using the Hypervelocity Engineering (HVE) methodology. The role involves customer technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and providing product roadmap feedback. It's a senior individual contributor position on the technical leadership career path, requiring deep technical skills and customer engagement.

What you'd actually do

  1. Demonstrate engineering excellence by staying current on the latest software engineering practices, helping the team embrace new technologies with rigor and consistency, and actively exchanging ideas with leading practitioners across ISE, Microsoft, and the broader industry to raise the bar on how we build and deliver.
  2. Provide customer technical leadership by engaging directly in lighthouse customer engagements, developing a strong understanding of customer business needs, and helping customers adopt the latest Microsoft technologies across the full stack to deliver meaningful business outcomes.
  3. Provide product roadmap feedback by identifying recurring patterns across customer engagements, building trusted relationships with Microsoft product group leaders, and helping advance the product roadmap through clear, evidence-based insights from the field.
  4. Apply hands-on technical skills to advance the capabilities of both our own teams and our customers’ teams, and demonstrate the art of the possible through practical problem solving, prototyping, and direct engineering engagement.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • Extensive customer-facing experience working directly with senior customer stakeholders at executive-minus-one level (e.g., CTO/CIO/CDO direct reports, Business Unit leaders), with a track record of building trusted-advisor relationships, influencing technology strategy, and translating engineering depth into business outcomes.

Nice to have

  • containerize compute workloads
  • Work with high scale data
  • build end-to-end engineering deployment systems
  • use emerging AI technologies to accelerate developers and solve new challenges
  • learning about new technology is part of our work every day

What the JD emphasized

  • deep experience and expertise in designing and delivering solutions using modern software engineering practices and cloud technologies
  • thrives in working with a variety of technologies, not just Microsoft technology
  • engaging directly with customers on their toughest technical challenges
  • senior individual contributor role on Microsoft technical leadership career path
  • deep technical skills with the ability to provide leadership at the seniormost levels within Microsoft and at our customers