Overview
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead the strategic evolution of the Experimentation and Configuration Service (ECS), Microsoft’s platform for safe, scalable, intelligent, and resilient configuration management.
As a Principal Software Engineer in ECS, you will be accountable for broad technical direction across a major platform area or cross-team initiative. You will lead complex architecture from ideation to production, create clarity across teams, drive multi-release technical strategy, and influence engineering practices across ECS and partner organizations.
This role is for a technical leader who can operate in ambiguous problem spaces, broker difficult cross-team architecture decisions, and change the momentum of current plans toward higher-impact outcomes. You will help ECS evolve into an agentic-native Continuous Configuration platform for Microsoft services, combining distributed systems expertise, operational excellence, AI-native development, and customer-focused platform strategy.
About the ECS Team
The ECS team builds the Experimentation and Configuration platform used by Microsoft services to manage safe configuration delivery, experimentation, feature rollout, policy enforcement, telemetry, reliability, authenticated access, and operational governance at scale.
ECS is transforming from a traditional configuration platform into an intelligent, agentic-native infrastructure layer. The team is investing in AI-assisted engineering, MCP interfaces, agent-powered troubleshooting, autonomous validation, self-healing workflows, configuration intelligence, and compliance automation to help Microsoft services move faster while reducing operational risk.
Why Join Us
This is a great opportunity to shape a foundational Microsoft platform at the moment when configuration management, AI-native engineering, service reliability, and agentic automation are converging. As a Principal Software Engineer in ECS, you will help define the next generation of Continuous Configuration for Microsoft, influencing how services safely ship, validate, diagnose, and recover at global scale.
You will work on deeply technical, high-impact problems with broad customer reach, influence cross-team strategy, and help build an engineering system where agents and humans collaborate to deliver safer, faster, and more intelligent platform outcomes.
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
- Strategic Technical Leadership: Define and drive the architecture, roadmap, and execution strategy for a major ECS platform area or cross-team initiative with multi-release impact.
- Cross-Team Architecture Ownership: Broker complex architecture decisions across ECS, partner teams, PM, security, compliance, and service owners; create shared direction and durable technical alignment.
- Agentic-Native Platform Transformation: Lead the design and adoption of agentic-native engineering systems, including AI coding agents, MCP interfaces, SKILLs, intelligent automation, and AI-native engineering practices such as harness engineering, loop engineering, and evaluation systems.
- Technical Vision & Long-Term Direction: Translate ambiguous customer, business, security, reliability, and operational needs into clear technical bets, phased execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
- Platform Quality & Engineering Excellence: Define quality metrics, coding patterns, validation strategy, telemetry, observability, and operational readiness standards that raise the engineering bar across ECS.
- Complex Problem Resolution: Resolve the hardest technical and product-system problems in ECS, including issues spanning distributed systems, scale, reliability, security, compliance, and cross-service dependencies.
- Customer & Partner Influence: Build trusted technical relationships with major partner teams and use customer insights, production signals, and platform adoption data to improve ECS strategy and design.
- Organizational Impact: Change the momentum of existing plans where needed, identify higher-impact directions, and help teams pivot toward better customer and business outcomes.
- Mentorship & Capability Building: Mentor senior engineers and tech leads, build durable technical capability across the team, and create an inclusive engineering environment where people can do their best work.
- Operational Accountability: Ensure ECS platform investments are designed for production excellence, measurable customer impact, cost awareness, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- 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 or equivalent experience.
- Proven experience leading architecture and delivery of large-scale cloud services, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure across multiple teams.
- Deep technical expertise in service architecture, reliability engineering, distributed systems, telemetry, security, scalability, and production operations.
- Demonstrated ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives, create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, and influence senior technical stakeholders.
- Solid coding and design judgment, with a track record of delivering simple, maintainable, high-quality technical solutions.
- Experience adopting or leading AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, automation platforms, or intelligent engineering systems.
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 8+ 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 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.
Experience with configuration management, experimentation platforms, feature rollout systems, policy engines, SDKs, service control planes, or large-scale developer platforms.
Experience defining multi-year technical strategy, architecture direction, or engineering standards across product groups.
Experience with Copilot, AI agents, MCP, SKILLs, autonomous troubleshooting, self-healing systems, AI-native platform engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, evaluation platforms, or agentic software development frameworks.
Proven ability to drive reliability, compliance, security, and operational excellence for mission-critical services.
Solid ability to synthesize production data, customer feedback, and business priorities into actionable technical strategy.
Experience mentoring senior engineers, growing technical leaders, and shaping engineering culture.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially for executive-level technical narratives, design reviews, and cross-org decision making.
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.**