Jobs and Careers

Principal Software Engineer / Principal AI Engineer - Commerce Platforms

Washington, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 10 Aug 2026

💰 $274,800/yr($142,800/yr – $274,800/yr)

About the role

Overview

Microsoft’s Commerce Platforms organization enables scalable, resilient, and AI-powered commerce and finance platforms by improving governance, accelerating decisions, and streamlining end-to-end operations.

Our teams build and operate the intelligent commerce foundations, financial platforms, global payments systems, offer management services, commerce data platforms, AI-powered capabilities, and cloud-scale infrastructure that power Microsoft’s worldwide commerce ecosystem. These mission-critical platforms support customers, partners, and employees globally while enabling secure, reliable, scalable, compliant, and data-driven commerce experiences.

We are hiring for multiple Principal Software Engineer and Principal AI Engineer opportunities across Commerce Platforms. These roles span several high-impact engineering areas, including:

AI-powered business applications and intelligent automation
Financial Platforms and Revenue Systems
Global Payments Platforms
Offers & Data Model
Commerce Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering

In these roles, you will provide technical leadership across complex, interconnected commerce systems. You will help define platform strategy, drive architecture, modernize services, scale AI-native engineering practices, and influence technical direction across teams. Whether your background is in distributed systems, payments, financial platforms, commerce data, cloud infrastructure, or production AI systems, you will have the opportunity to shape platforms that power Microsoft’s global commerce ecosystem.

You will partner across engineering, product, research, data, security, compliance, and business teams to solve ambiguous technical challenges, deliver durable platform capabilities, and create business-critical impact at global scale.

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.

Responsibilities

Lead architecture, technical strategy, and design for large-scale commerce, financial, payments, data, AI, and cloud platform systems.Define and drive technical direction across complex services, platforms, and cross-team initiatives.
Design and evolve cloud-native distributed systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, performance, security, compliance, accessibility, and operational excellence.
Lead the development of AI-powered capabilities, intelligent automation, agentic workflows, LLM-enabled applications, data-driven insights, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
Drive platform modernization efforts that improve system consistency, extensibility, resiliency, developer productivity, and long-term maintainability.
Influence roadmaps and technical investments by partnering with engineering leaders, product managers, architects, researchers, data scientists, and business stakeholders.
Evaluate technical tradeoffs, manage dependencies, and resolve architectural challenges across multiple teams, systems, and organizations.
Champion engineering excellence through secure development practices, automation, CI/CD, observability, testing, telemetry, incident response, and live-site rigor.
Establish patterns, frameworks, and reusable platform capabilities that enable teams to deliver faster and with higher quality.
Mentor and develop engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and leadership by example.
Help foster an inclusive engineering culture grounded in collaboration, accountability, customer focus, and continuous learning.

Qualifications

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, 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. 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