Principal Software Engineer

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

The Principal Software Engineer will join the M365 Evaluation Platform Team to enhance the evaluation system for AI offerings, supporting millions of users. The role involves building capabilities to enable agile and faster evaluations, providing continuous tools throughout the development lifecycle, and automating tasks via tools or agents to improve performance understanding. The focus is on building reliable, scalable infrastructure and driving quality in products using data, with a platform engineering mindset.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
  2. Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
  3. Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
  4. Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., projects managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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

  • 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
  • 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
  • equivalent experience
  • Experience building systems to evaluate and drive quality in a product and using data to drive engineering decisions.
  • A focus for building reliable, scalable infrastructure and making users successful.
  • Comfortable at operating in a dynamic environment; takes initiative to bring clarity and momentum.
  • Self-motivated and outcomes-focused, with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.
  • Platform engineering mindset: building reusable components, reducing time‑to‑launch, improving debuggability, and delivering well‑documented tooling.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership experience in evaluation, distributed systems or development platforms.

What the JD emphasized

  • evaluation system
  • eval system
  • evaluation capabilities
  • evaluation
  • evaluations

Other signals

  • evaluation system
  • AI offerings
  • user journeys of an eval system
  • fine tuning a model
  • launching a new feature or experiment
  • adding metrics
  • onboarding a new 1P or 3P partner
  • understanding user feedback
  • creating query sets
  • automate tasks via tools or agents
  • understand our performance better
  • drive the feedback loop for its AI offerings
  • how AI impacts millions of users
  • steering one of Microsoft’s most important efforts forward
  • taking our evaluation system to the next level for our builders and partners