Principal Software Engineer

The Commerce organization builds and operates scalable, resilient, and AI-powered data platforms that transform complex financial and infrastructure data into trusted insights, enabling faster, data-driven business decisions. We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to architect, design and develop a large-scale data platform that delivers actionable insights into data center infrastructure capacity utilization and product consumption revenue and enable business teams with key insights.

This role sits at the intersection of cloud-native distributed systems, advanced data engineering, and AI-powered software engineering. The successful candidate will define the technical vision and architect large-scale data platforms that transform massive volumes of infrastructure telemetry, consumption, and revenue data into trusted, explainable insights that drive capacity planning, infrastructure optimization, operational efficiency, and CapEx investment decisions.

As a technical leader, you will own the architecture of data ingestion, processing and modeling analytics. You will leverage AI-assisted development and agentic engineering workflows to accelerate software delivery, modernize complex data systems, and establish engineering practices that enhance developer productivity, system reliability, and analytical accuracy. The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on engineering expertise, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to navigate ambiguity and influence cross-organizational initiatives while delivering measurable business impact at scale.

This role requires you to be onsite 3 days a week in Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, WA.

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.

• Architect highly scalable distributed data systems to process massive volumes of infrastructure telemetry, and cloud product consumption data.
• Design reusable data processing frameworks, canonical data models, and data contracts that accommodate evolving business requirements.
• Establish robust data engineering patterns for incremental processing, late-arriving data, historical backfills, reconciliation, lineage, and schema evolution.
• Lead architectural decisions across cloud data platforms, distributed compute engines, data lakes, streaming and batch processing, and analytical serving systems, balancing data freshness, correctness, performance, and cost.
• Deliver actionable, explainable insights using AI and advanced analytics to drive business impact and data-driven decision-making.
• Design AI-powered software engineering workflows leveraging coding agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), domain knowledge repositories, and tool-integrated agents to accelerate development and modernization of large-scale data systems.
• Apply AI to analyze legacy codebases, map dependencies, generate implementation plans, automate refactoring, and improve test generation and code quality.
• Develop agentic workflows to streamline data pipeline development, code reviews, failure triage, root-cause analysis, and operational knowledge discovery.
• Establish governance and quality guardrails for AI-generated code, including automated testing, data correctness validation, security reviews, and production-readiness checks.
• Drive measurable improvements in engineering productivity, development lead time, test automation, defect reduction, pipeline reliability, observability, and recovery time
• Embody our culture and values. 

Required/Minimum 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 Scala, Python, C#, Java OR equivalent experience. 

Other Requirements:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred/Additional Qualifications:

• Expertise in architecting, building, and operating production-grade, cloud-native data platforms using Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, or equivalent technologies.
• Deep proficiency in Apache Spark, Delta Lake, distributed systems, SQL, or large-scale batch and streaming data processing.
• Demonstrated programming skills in Scala, Python, C#, Java, or equivalent, with a focus on maintainable, testable, and high-performance production software.
• Extensive experience in data modeling, analytical data systems, and SQL-based data analysis, including translating ambiguous business requirements into actionable metrics and insights.
• Proven ability to optimize distributed workloads, compute, storage, query execution, data partitioning, and processing costs.
• Experience building reliable data platforms with robust data quality, observability, governance, lineage, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated understanding of statistical analysis, time-series analytics, anomaly detection, and forecasting.
• Practical experience applying AI coding assistants, LLMs (Large Language Models), and agentic workflows to software development, code modernization, testing, and engineering automation.
• Understanding of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), embeddings, semantic search, tool calling, and agent orchestration, with experience implementing appropriate security, correctness, reliability, and human oversight controls.
• Proven ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives, influence architecture and engineering strategy, navigate ambiguity, and deliver measurable business outcomes.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.