Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Bengaluru, KA, IN · Software Engineering

Principal Software Engineer in the CoreAI organization at Microsoft, focusing on building and integrating Responsible AI services. The role involves developing customer-facing, high-performance, low-latency, and high-availability AI services, improving AI tools across the SDLC, and ensuring Responsible AI controls and engineering-health metrics are embedded. Responsibilities include coding, system design, driving engineering excellence, implementing AI features with guardrails, and ensuring reliability and supportability.

What you'd actually do

  1. Improve AI tools and practices across the SDLC, own the quality of AI-generated artifacts, and embed Responsible AI controls and engineering-health metrics (e.g., Accelerate/SPACE/ESSP).
  2. Lead and mentor teams to deliver secure, performant, well-tested, maintainable code—using modern coding patterns (including GenAI where appropriate), strong diagnostics/telemetry, and disciplined reviews/retrospectives to prevent and resolve production issues.
  3. Own architecture and design decisions for complex systems, evaluating options and tradeoffs to meet security, privacy, scalability, resiliency/DR, cost, and testability requirements while coordinating dependencies across teams.
  4. Drive best practices, learning, and developer tooling to raise engineering standards— especially around security/compliance evidence, “security as code,” automation, and scalable, reliable delivery.
  5. Plan and execute delivery with experimentation/flightings, clear success and guardrail metrics, secure rollout/rollback strategies, and automated deployments aligned to schedules and operational readiness.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Hands-on development in one or more modern programming languages (C#, Java, goLang, Python)
  • Strong understanding of core software engineering fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, scalable system principles)
  • Experience developing, testing, debugging, and maintaining production-quality code
  • Working knowledge of cloud, distributed systems, or service-based architectures
  • Designing and Architecting Business Solutions
  • Driving Solution Improvement and Excellence
  • Engineering Robust Software Solutions
  • Solving Problems Through a Data-Driven Approach

Nice to have

  • 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with coding in languages such as C#, goLang, Python
  • Solid technical judgment and problem-solving skills
  • Ability to collaborate effectively and influence peers
  • Demonstrated collaboration and emerging leadership skills
  • Exposure to AI platforms, large language models (LLMs), and core machine-learning concepts

What the JD emphasized

  • Responsible AI
  • customer-facing
  • high performance
  • low latency
  • high availability
  • secure rollout/rollback strategies

Other signals

  • Responsible AI
  • customer-facing AI services
  • low latency
  • high availability
  • AI stack