Senior and Principal Software Engineers - Azure AI Search

Overview
Business Group Overview  Within AI Platform, the Azure AI Search team powers rich knowledge base experiences for apps of all kinds. We integrate the best of Microsoft AI for content understanding, search relevance, and knowledge sources.   Job Purpose Overview  Join Azure AI Search Engineering Foundations as a Senior or Principal Software Engineer and help transform how we build, validate, ship, and operate AI Search at scale—securely and reliably. You’ll improve the end-to-end developer experience across inner-loop productivity and outer-loop CI/CD, validation, release, and operations by turning ambiguous engineering pain points into practical tooling, automation, and standards that teams adopt. This role is hands-on and high leverage: you’ll partner across feature and platform teams, modernize engineering processes (including AI-assisted developer workflows), and deliver measurable improvements such as faster PR validation, shorter build/test times, more reliable pipelines, and reduced manual toil. Quality and security are core—spanning areas like identity, secrets, authentication, certificates, compliance workflows, and engineering validation frameworks—so your impact shows up every day in how confidently and efficiently engineers can deliver. We focus on areas like identity, secrets, authentication, certificates, pipelines, tools, DevOps, build, test and validation frameworks, lab environments and management, and security. Our role is to deeply understand these domains, partner with Azure and Microsoft infrastructure teams, and establish guidelines and processes that remove friction for our engineering community. What makes our work truly interesting is the customer focus and empathy required: we listen to our developers, anticipate their challenges, and proactively design solutions that help them achieve their goals faster and more securely. Whether it’s defining best practices for secure identity management, streamlining CI/CD pipelines, architecting our infrastructure, or creating frameworks for automated validation, our impact is measured by the success of the engineers we support. If you’re passionate about becoming an expert, leading engineering culture, and making a tangible difference for our developers, you’ll find our team’s work both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver engineering foundations work end‑to‑end—spanning design, implementation, testing, rollout, and iteration—to improve the inner‑ and outer‑loop developer experience across Azure AI Search.
• Partner closely with feature, platform, and infrastructure teams to understand developer pain points, translate requirements into pragmatic tooling, automation, and process improvements, and drive adoption through collaboration and iteration. 
• Prototype, evaluate, and integrate AI‑assisted engineering tools and modern workflows that measurably improve developer productivity, quality, reliability, and operational confidence. 
• Design and incrementally deliver scalable, reliable, and efficient solutions across CI/CD pipelines, build and test infrastructure, validation frameworks, automation, and operational tooling—using data and feedback to validate impact.
• Apply a security‑first mindset in daily engineering work, including secure coding practices, threat modeling, identity and secrets hygiene, and compliance‑aware design.
• Navigate ambiguity by breaking down complex problems, proposing options and tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders around a clear direction, and communicating progress, risks, and outcomes effectively.
• Lead by example through strong technical judgment, mentorship, and collaboration, helping raise the bar for engineering practices while fostering an inclusive, high‑trust team culture.
• Define and influence a high‑quality developer experience for Azure AI Search by setting standards, establishing best practices, and driving improvements that enable engineering teams to thrive.
• Deliver results with a focus on measurable outcomes, such as reduced build and test times, faster PR validation, improved pipeline reliability, and decreased manual toil.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. 

Additional or preferred qualifications 

• Experience building or operating services on Azure (or comparable cloud platform). 
• Experience with secure engineering practices (e.g., threat modeling, secure coding, secrets management, managed