Senior & Principal Software Engineer - Systems & Infrastructure

Team Purpose

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Engineering Systems team at Microsoft builds the cloud platform, engineering infrastructure, and developer systems that enable teams to develop, deploy, and operate AI services at scale. You will help create foundational capabilities spanning data infrastructure, storage systems, streaming platforms, traffic and network infrastructure, observability, security, and service lifecycle management. Working with AI researchers, product engineers, and hardware teams, you will help provide reliable and consistent paths from development to production within a multidisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive engineering team.

We are tackling complex, open-ended infrastructure challenges, evolving existing production systems while building the next generation of infrastructure for AI workloads, where engineers have the opportunity to help shape both the technical direction and the solutions.

Role Summary

As a Senior or Principal Software Engineer, Systems and Infrastructure in the AI Infrastructure Engineering Systems team, you will own technical strategy and solution architecture for broad or complex infrastructure requirements. You will design and improve large-scale distributed systems, drive observability and production automation, and guide secure, reliable, and cost-effective solutions across data, storage, streaming, traffic, network, and other foundational platforms. You will collaborate across teams, influence relevant open-source projects, mentor engineers, and iteratively deliver software that supports Microsoft's products and AI services at scale.

You will navigate ambiguous problem spaces, independently identify and prioritize technical challenges, and translate loosely defined requirements into pragmatic architectures and working systems.

This opportunity will allow you to lead complex distributed-system designs, advance engineering practices across foundational infrastructure, and grow your technical influence across teams and open-source communities.

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.

• Own technical strategy and lead architecture discussions for broad or complex infrastructure requirements, evaluating design hypotheses, trade-offs, dependencies, and long-term system needs.

• Design, implement, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for performance, scalability, resiliency, security, privacy, compliance, and cost efficiency.

• Improve system observability and understandability through metrics, logging, telemetry, and tools that support developer productivity and reliable operation.

• Independently create test strategies, incorporate security testing, improve test coverage, and address difficult-to-test areas through design or rearchitecture.

• Diagnose production issues, conduct incident retrospectives, implement preventive actions, and drive automation across production deployment and routine operations.

• Participate in and influence relevant open-source projects, and identify or build reusable internal and open-source tools that improve engineering effectiveness.

• Communicate with stakeholders and partner teams, resolve cross-team dependencies, mentor engineers, and iteratively deliver software at scale.

• Collaborate across infrastructure and AI teams to improve the performance, efficiency, and reliability of large-scale AI workloads, including model inference.
• Drive complex, ambiguous infrastructure initiatives from problem discovery through architecture, implementation, and production, making sound technical decisions and navigating trade-offs with incomplete information.