Principal Software Architect

Do you want to be at the forefront of innovating the latest hardware and systems designs to propel Microsoft’s cloud growth? Are you seeking a unique career opportunity that combines technical capabilities, cross team collaboration, with business insight and strategy?

Join our Leading-Edge Architecture Pathfinding (LEAP) team within the Strategic Planning and Architecture (SPARC) organization in Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure (AHSI). AHSI is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding cloud business, responsible for delivering the hardware systems and infrastructure for cloud computing across Microsoft Azure, Bing, MSN, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Teams and Xbox Live. 

The SPARC organization is responsible for strategy, planning and architecture pathfinding, and manages Azure’s hardware roadmap from architecture concept through production for Microsoft’s current and future on-line services. The LEAP team within SPARC is at the forefront of systems architecture and technology pathfinding spanning compute, memory, storage, network and system interconnects. Drawing on deep insights of workloads, emerging technology trends, and focused industry engagements, LEAP team’s charter is to define and evaluate novel systems architecture innovations through hardware/software co-design and advance them through technical readiness for productization.

The LEAP team is seeking a Principal Software Architect

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 evaluation, pathfinding, and software enabling acceleration of hardware technologies enabling infrastructure optimization, workload acceleration, and improving Azure fundamentals.
  • These technologies span novel chiplet-based System on a Chip
    (SoC) constructions, high-performance interconnects, Input/output (I/O) subsystems, tiered memory architectures, and system designs for resource disaggregation in future cloud computing systems. This role has substantial technical and roadmap shaping responsibilities that require in-depth technical expertise, proven track-record leading hardware/software co-designed innovations, and experience to influence and drive innovations from concept to productization. Success in this role requires:
• Listening to those who operate Azure and their customers to identify current and emerging problems
• Identifying promising technologies to address problems that are relevant for Azure business, engage with ecosystem partners, and derisking productization via capable proof-of-concepts
• Working across organizational boundaries with roadmap planners, product architects, and hardware/software engineering teams to land promising solutions in Azure data centers.
• Collaborating closely with software principals to influence and accelerate time to solution through software support for hardware technologies in product roadmap.
• Lead team of software engineers in identifying and developing capable end to end software proof-of-concepts to evaluate novel hardware technologies for Azure usages and deployment scenarios.
• Develop and lead detailed performance analysis methodologies and tools to evaluate systems innovations and guide hardware architecture directions.
• Collaborate across domain experts on workloads, software, SoC and platform to engineer TCO-optimized solutions for Azure usages.
• Engage with Azure’s supplier ecosystem on collaborations that deliver on the above charter
• Influence and shape hardware architecture, targeting three-to-six-year timeframe, with software analysis and prototyping driven analysis, insights and recommendations.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience
• 7+ years of experience in Windows systems software (Operating system kernel, memory management, I/O stacks, Virtualization) withdemonstrated track record of success, guiding architecture and software