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Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft
United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 30 Oct 2025
💰 $304,200/yr($139,900/yr$304,200/yr)

About the role

As a Principal Software Engineer in the Substrate Deployment team, you will lead solutions that improve development agility, quality, and overall system health. You will design and implement enhancements to our deployment ecosystem, helping teams ship faster and safer across both cloud and on-premise environments. You will work closely with architects and partner teams to drive impactful improvements to our engineering workflows and infrastructure. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, engage in architectural improvements that shape the future of deployment, and gain hands-on experience with large-scale deployment systems across both cloud and on-premise platforms.


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

  • Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
  • Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
  • Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
  • Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
  • Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
  • Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.

Qualifications

Required 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.
  • Proficiency in system architecture and design skills, with ability to make high-impact technical decisions balancing scalability, resilience, and agility.
  • Experience as a technical leader across multiple teams or org boundaries, influencing architecture and driving alignment across partner teams.
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release management systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • Proficient with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) systems, with proven experience architecting safe, scalable, and automated rollout workflows across thousands of services.
  • Hands-on experience improving deployment agility while maintaining security, compliance, and operations across large engineering ecosystems.
  • Experience integrating observability, telemetry, and health signals into deployment workflows to enable automated decision-making and rollback triggers.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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

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Company

Microsoft

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