Principal Software Engineer
 Microsoft | |
 United States, Washington, Redmond | |
 Sep 04, 2025 | |
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OverviewMicrosoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit thinking in a cloud-enabled world.Microsoft's Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging & real-time analytics, and business intelligence. The products our portfolio include Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a data culture. Within Azure Data, the databases team builds and maintains Microsoft's operational Database systems. We store and manage data in a structured way to enable multitude of applications across various industries. We are on a journey to enable developer friendly, mission-critical, AI enabled operational Databases across relational, non-relational and OSS offerings. We research and develop algorithms, tools and high-performance libraries to build state-of-the-art AI-based information retrieval in Azure Data products. For example, we build market-leading vector search in multiple data products, for which innovate both on the research and engineering (e.g., see the DiskANN project). We also work on semantic search more broadly.We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to work closely with research and engineering teams to innovate and translate innovations into product in this area. We do not just value differences or different perspectives. We seek them out and invite them in so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. As a result, our customers are better served.
ResponsibilitiesLeads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform. Leads identification of other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's own system may provide support to others. Leads efforts to determine back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product. Demonstrates deep understanding of up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, driving reliability in the solutions, and optimize dependency chains and retrieves across teams. Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. Enables cross team communications and resolves conflicts between teams.Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices.Considers and leads the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products. Defines and develops standardized, repeatable, scalable solutions to guarantee quality.Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates any issue that would cause a major delay.Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft's quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area. Applies feedback to current and future iterations. Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews, and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices.Embody our culture and values | |