Principal Software Engineer, AI Infra Management and Ops

Help shape the future of cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence platforms at unprecedented scale. Our team is building the foundational platform capabilities that power large-scale distributed systems, accelerated computing environments, and next-generation cloud services. You will work at the intersection of software, infrastructure, networking, and datacenter technologies to enable reliable, secure, and scalable platforms that support a broad range of business-critical workloads. You will collaborate with engineering teams across Microsoft to advance platform capabilities, accelerate innovation, and improve operational excellence across diverse infrastructure environments.   As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and infrastructure services that support service lifecycle management, resource orchestration, observability, reliability, and automation. You will help guide technical strategy across multiple engineering investments, contribute to architecture decisions involving compute, networking, storage, and platform services, and collaborate across organizations to deliver capabilities that improve platform efficiency and developer productivity. This opportunity will allow you to deepen your expertise in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, expand your influence across engineering organizations, and contribute to innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure, graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms, high-performance networking, and large-scale datacenter systems.   Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We cultivate a culture grounded in respect, integrity, accountability, inclusion, collaboration, and continuous learning, enabling individuals and teams to grow, contribute, and make meaningful impact.

Lead the design, development, and evolution of cloud-native services, distributed systems, and platform capabilities that support large-scale production environments. Collaborate across engineering organizations to help define technical direction and architecture for platform infrastructure, cloud services, networking, storage, compute, and operational excellence investments. Guide the development of platform engineering capabilities that improve deployment automation, service lifecycle management, observability, reliability, scalability, and developer productivity. Advance software engineering practices including Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), testing, security, monitoring, and operational readiness throughout the engineering lifecycle. Contribute to the design and operation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure, High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, bare-metal infrastructure, graphics processing unit (GPU) environments, and large-scale distributed computing systems. Collaborate on datacenter architecture and networking solutions, including rack-scale systems, network topology design, Ethernet fabrics, InfiniBand fabrics, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs), Data Processing Units (DPUs), and accelerated computing platforms. Foster a culture of technical excellence through architecture collaboration, mentorship, knowledge sharing, design review participation, and support for engineering excellence across the broader organization.

Required Qualifications:  Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.   Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. This includes passing the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer