Principal 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.  As a Principal Software Engineer, Forward Deployed , you are one of the founding technical leaders of this team. You will own our hardest and most strategic engagements end to end — frontier AI labs, silicon partners, and the enterprise engineering organizations whose adoption decision sets the pattern for everyone watching them — and you will define how forward-deployed engineering works at Windows scale: the engagement model, the technical bar, the reusable asset library, and the path from field evidence into platform roadmaps.  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 the flagship engagements  Take personal, end-to-end technical ownership of the engagements with the highest stakes: partners building on and alongside Windows, silicon partners whose platforms define the AI developer experience, and enterprise engineering organizations whose choices move the market.  Discover: get inside a customer's actual engineering reality — their architecture, their roadmap, their constraints, and the honest reason Windows is or is not their default. Establish the problem statement, the baseline, the agreed success measures and the plan.  Build: work in their codebase and in ours. Design and ship the integrations, prototypes, reference implementations, tooling and platform changes that make adoption real. Apply engineering standards — security, privacy, maintainability, supportability — to work that will run in production long after the engagement ends.  Validate: prove the outcome with measurement the customer agrees with, not with a demo.  Stay hands-on:  Write the prototypes, read the traces, work in the customer's repository. Your credibility with partner engineering leadership rests on doing the work, not describing it.  Be the technical face of Windows to engineering leadership  Hold the technical relationship with partner chief technical officers (CTOs), engineering vice presidents (VPs) and principal engineers — and hold the same credibility with the engineers doing the work.  Deliver unwelcome answers well. Part of this job is telling a customer that Windows is not yet the right answer for something and then owning the plan that changes it.  Coordinate with Microsoft field, partner and independent software vendor (ISV) teams so the customer experiences one Microsoft rather than several.  Define how this team works  With the team's manager and the other principal, design the engagement model: how accounts are selected and sequenced, what an engagement commits to, how success is measured, when we