Senior Software Engineer

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

Senior Software Engineer on the Bing Multimedia team, focusing on building and evolving large-scale offline infrastructure for image and video search. The role involves designing, building, and operating scalable platforms that process vast amounts of data, with a strong emphasis on engineering metrics like latency, cost, availability, and quality. The team leverages state-of-the-art ML models and AI-assisted engineering practices to deliver world-class visual search experiences.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, build, and evolve large-scale platforms for processing and storing billions of documents, with availability, latency, cost efficiency, and quality treated as first-class engineering goals.
  2. Apply a metrics-driven engineering mindset when designing and shipping features—defining success criteria upfront and using data to drive prioritization, iteration, and measurable impact.
  3. Partner with and empower scientists and engineers working across big data, computer vision, and machine learning, enabling rapid progress in a fast‑evolving technical landscape.
  4. Build and operate services that support large-scale experimentation and research, enabling fast iteration and learning while ensuring efficient utilization of compute, storage, and other shared resources.
  5. Continuously evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including hardware acceleration and modern search and AI techniques, to improve system efficiency and elevate the end-to-end search experience.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience
  • coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements
  • Microsoft Cloud Background Check

Nice to have

  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience
  • Hands-on experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems, with an emphasis on performance, reliability, availability, and scalability.
  • Experience applying established software design patterns and engineering best practices in large, evolving codebases.
  • Familiarity with large-scale data processing and streaming technologies (for example: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, or similar systems).
  • Solid problem‑solving and critical‑thinking skills, with the ability to reason about complex systems and tradeoffs.
  • Effective communication skills and a demonstrated ability to collaborate across engineering, research, and partner teams.
  • A growth mindset and passion for delivering high‑quality user experiences, continuously learning and adapting as technologies evolve.
  • Experience driving engineering excellence at scale, balancing speed and innovation with quality, reliability, and operational rigor.
  • Interest in or experience with AI‑assisted and AI‑native engineering practices to improve developer productivity and software quality.

What the JD emphasized

  • large-scale platforms
  • availability, latency, cost efficiency, and quality
  • metrics-driven engineering mindset
  • partner with and empower scientists and engineers
  • large-scale experimentation and research
  • efficient utilization of compute, storage, and other shared resources
  • emerging technologies
  • AI-assisted engineering practices

Other signals

  • powers image and video search
  • state-of-the-art ML models
  • highly scalable infrastructure
  • deep understanding of visual content
  • offline infrastructure enabling these capabilities end-to-end
  • latency, cost, availability, and quality are first-class engineering metrics
  • AI-native: we actively adopt modern, AI-assisted engineering practices