Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Windows is where most of the world's developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. Coding agents, local inference, containerized toolchains and AI-native workflows are all arriving at once and the engineering organizations adopting them fastest are the ones whose experience should be shaping Windows.  The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close that loop directly. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers inside their environments, and own the outcome: the customer's developers and agents running production workloads on Windows.  We are measured on adoption. Not revenue, not renewals, not tickets closed. When a customer's engineering organization moves a real workload onto Windows and keeps it there, that is the result.  This is a founding team. The engineers who join it will define the engagement model rather than inherit one.  As a Senior Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you will own engagements end to end, discovery through production, and carry the team's depth on the developer platform itself: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), the developer environment, provisioning and configuration at scale, toolchain and build performance, and the security, identity and policy controls that too often decide whether a developer stays on Windows or asks for a Mac. When an engineering organization tells us their developers are more productive somewhere else, you are the person who finds out whether that is true, why, and what it takes to change it.  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. Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Own forward-deployed engagements end to end  Discover: embed with a customer's engineering organization to understand their development workflow, their constraints, and what is actually blocking adoption. Establish a clear technical problem statement, a baseline, agreed success measures, and a plan.  Build: design and implement solutions alongside the customer's engineers. Write the automation, configuration, provisioning logic, integrations and reference implementations. Apply real engineering standards — security, privacy, maintainability, supportability — to work that will outlive the engagement.  Validate: prove the improvement in the customer's environment with measurement they agree with, not with a demo.  Carry the team's depth on the developer platform  Be the team's authority on how real development happens on Windows at enterprise scale: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Subsystem for Linux Containers (WSLC), containers and virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration, toolchain and build performance, continuous integration (CI) and inner-loop latency, and the identity, security and endpoint-policy controls that constrain all of it.  Diagnose the friction that drives developer populations off Windows — whether it originates in the platform, in enterprise configuration, in tooling, or in a gap between them — and fix it at the right layer.  Build the artifacts customers deploy in production: configuration baselines, provisioning automation, diagnostic tooling, reference environments.  Close the loop with product engineering  Bring evidence back to Windows, WSL, developer tooling and security product teams with enough rigor — reproductions, traces, measurements, business impact — that it changes what