Principal Software Engineer (ai / Agentic Developer Productivity)

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

The Principal Software Engineer will build and own the agentic engineering platform used across Microsoft, orchestrating AI models to enhance developer productivity. This role involves designing, implementing, and shipping features for the platform, advocating for best practices in agentic development, and mentoring other engineers. The focus is on creating the core agentic platform and experiences, with a tight feedback loop from internal developer customers.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle, including design, architecture, implementation, testability, debugging, shipping, and servicing.
  2. Use AI in your daily coding and advocate to the team and customers an evolving state-of-the-art of how best to do this.
  3. Demonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work — because no one has tried them before.
  4. Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers in, and beyond, your team.
  5. Write and review clean, well-thought-out code with an emphasis on quality, performance, simplicity, durability, scalability, and maintainability.

Skills

Required

  • 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
  • equivalent experience

Nice to have

  • Prior experience building with Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar).
  • Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.
  • Proven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.
  • Proficient software engineering fundamentals: system design, algorithms, testing, debugging, and code review.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.
  • Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.
  • Hands-on experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as: GitHub Copilot and Copilot Workspace, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT, Cursor.
  • Prior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.
  • Experience dogfooding, evaluating, and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translating those insights into team-wide best practices
  • Background in developer tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines, or engineering systems at scale.

What the JD emphasized

  • agentic AI development
  • shipping with it
  • agentic platform
  • agentic development
  • AI-Powered developer efficiency

Other signals

  • building the agentic platform
  • orchestrating the latest AI models
  • company-wide developer productivity
  • AI-assisted large-scale codebase refactoring
  • automated package integrations
  • deep architectural Q&A over codebases
  • human-in-the-loop directed code changes