Overview
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Experimentation and Configuration Service (ECS) team and help lead the next generation of Microsoft’s safe, scalable, and resilient configuration platform.
As a Senior Software Engineer in ECS, you will often serve as the technical lead for a feature crew or major platform area. You will own complex technical problems end-to-end, define architecture and execution strategy, mentor engineers, influence partner teams, and drive outcomes that improve ECS reliability, customer experience, and engineering velocity.
This role requires strong technical judgment, strategic thinking, and the ability to create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces. You will be expected to go beyond implementation and shape how the team designs, validates, operates, and evolves ECS platform capabilities.
About the ECS Team
The ECS team is responsible for Microsoft’s Experimentation and Configuration platform, enabling safe rollout, continuous configuration delivery, feature experimentation, policy-driven governance, telemetry, and resilient configuration consumption across Microsoft 365 and broader Microsoft workloads.
ECS operates at the intersection of distributed systems, live-site reliability, security, compliance, and AI-native engineering. The team is transforming ECS into an agentic-native Continuous Configuration system by integrating AI coding agents, operational agents, MCP interfaces, automated validation, intelligent troubleshooting, and self-healing workflows into the platform and engineering process.
Why Join Us
This role gives you the opportunity to lead meaningful platform work at Microsoft scale. As a Senior Software Engineer in ECS, you will shape critical configuration infrastructure, improve how Microsoft services safely roll out change, and help define the team’s agentic-native engineering model. You will work on high-impact problems where strong technical leadership, customer empathy, and operational excellence directly translate into safer and faster service delivery across Microsoft.
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
- Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical lead for a feature crew or major ECS platform area, driving architecture, execution strategy, design quality, and delivery outcomes.
- Strategic Feature Ownership: Own high-impact ECS capabilities across multiple releases, building roadmaps, evaluating progress, and ensuring investments deliver measurable product, customer, and business value.
- Complex Problem Solving: Scope and resolve technically complex and ambiguous problems requiring cross-team alignment, architectural judgment, and sustained execution.
- Agentic-Native Engineering: Lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic development practices across the crew, including coding agents, MCP-based automation, SKILLs, automated validation, operational intelligence, and modern AI-native engineering practices and evaluation-driven development.
- Architecture & Design Quality: Develop elegant, resilient, and maintainable designs; improve others’ design specs; ensure solutions align with long-term ECS architecture.
- Reliability & Observability: Define telemetry, health signals, validation strategy, dashboards, and operational readiness criteria for major ECS capabilities.
- Engineering Lifecycle Improvements: Improve the team’s engineering lifecycle, including design reviews, test strategy, CI/CD, incident learnings, release quality, and production readiness.
- Customer & Partner Engagement: Represent ECS in technical discussions with partner teams and customers, translate pain points into platform improvements, and drive alignment across teams.
- Mentorship & Culture: Mentor engineers, model strong engineering practices, improve team culture, and help others increase technical depth and execution quality.
- Risk Management: Identify problems several steps ahead, manage dependencies, make informed tradeoffs, and know when to ship, hold, pivot, or escalate.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ 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 design and delivery of complex cloud services, distributed systems, or large-scale platform capabilities.
- Solid proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, Python, TypeScript, Go, or Rust.
- Experience with production service operations, telemetry, reliability engineering, incident analysis, and service quality improvements.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical discussions, mentor engineers, and influence decisions across teams.
- Experience working with AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, automation frameworks, or intelligent engineering tools.
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 6+ 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 8+ 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 large-scale configuration systems, experimentation platforms, feature rollout, policy enforcement, SDKs, or control-plane infrastructure.
Experience leading cross-team initiatives involving service reliability, security, compliance, or platform modernization.
Solid understanding of distributed systems design, scalability, fault tolerance, caching, service authentication, and observability.
Experience building automation-first operational systems, self-healing workflows, or intelligent troubleshooting experiences.
Ability to communicate complex technical issues clearly to engineering leaders, PMs, partner teams, and customers.
Demonstrated record of improving engineering practices, driving technical excellence, and developing others.
Familiarity with AI-native engineering practices such as harness engineering, loop engineering, evaluation systems, agent orchestration, or automated software development workflows.
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.**