Principal Software Engineer - Maia Model Enablement

The Maia Model Enablement team owns the end-to-end technical work required to bring frontier AI models onto Microsoft's AI accelerators and make them successful in production. Our work spans model enablement, performance optimization, serving capabilities, validation infrastructure, hardware bring-up, and cross-stack debugging.     We are looking for a Prinicipal Software Engineer who enjoys defining technical direction and solving complex, end-to-end systems challenges at the intersection of AI models, software, and hardware. Successful engineers combine deep technical expertise, strong systems thinking, and sound technical judgment to identify high-impact investments, align teams around durable solutions, and improve model enablement as a capability.     At Microsoft, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

What You’ll Do   Define and drive the technical strategy required to enable new AI models, model architectures, and hardware generations on Maia.   Lead complex cross-stack investigations spanning models, serving systems, infrastructure, and hardware, driving resolution of systemic technical challenges.   Drive platform-wide improvements in performance, scalability, and serving capabilities that benefit multiple models and future hardware generations.   Create durable automation, validation, and engineering systems that improve the speed, reliability, and repeatability of model enablement across the organization.   Align model, software, infrastructure, and hardware teams around shared technical direction, execution plans, and long-term platform investments.     How We Work   We work across the entire software stack, from model architectures and serving systems to infrastructure and hardware interactions.   The problems we solve evolve throughout the lifecycle of both models and hardware platforms. Engineers on the team regularly become effective in new domains and develop deep expertise when needed.   We rely heavily on measurement, experimentation, automation, and AI-assisted engineering workflows to move quickly and scale our impact.   We partner closely with model, software, and hardware teams to deliver production-ready solutions.     Success Looks Like   Multiple generations of models and hardware can be enabled more quickly because of architectural , platform, or process improvements you have driven.   Performance, scalability, and reliability improvements benefit broad classes of workloads rather than individual deployments.   Recurring technical challenges are transformed into reusable platform capabilities rather than repeatedly solved as one-off issues.   The organization is better prepared to adopt future hardware generations because of investments made ahead of need.   Maia model enablement becomes faster, more predictable, and more scalable across teams and workloads.

Required/Minimum Qualifications:  Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++, or Python, or equivalent experience.    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.    Additional or preferred qualifications:  Understanding of modern AI model architectures, inference