Principal Software Engineer

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our team in Mountain View, CA or Redmond, WA. In this role, you will bring exceptional design and development expertise, with a solid background in large-scale distributed systems, cloud computing platforms, high-performance data processing infrastructure, and machine learning training and inference pipelines. As a key technical leader, you will drive the vision, architecture, and implementation of our next-generation bidding platform and pipelines. Your work will have a direct impact on the experience of our advertisers and will play a critical role in increasing revenue across Bing Ads.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile  commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from  the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.  

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with data scientists and engineers to architect and develop the auto-bidding platform and associated pipelines.
• Design the platform to align with evolving advertiser product requirements, ensuring high-quality, timely delivery of features and enhancements.
• Build and optimize high-performance, scalable, and robust auto-bidding applications leveraging machine learning models both offline and online scenarios.
• Develop systems that enable reproducibility and traceability across modeling, optimization, and pacing components within the auto-bidding ecosystem.
• Implement large-scale data validation and quality assurance frameworks to ensure accuracy and consistency across all data inputs and outputs.
• Design and maintain comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems to ensure the reliability and performance of data pipelines and bidding applications.
• Construct scalable data pipeline to support rapid experimentation, real-time dashboards, deep insights for decision-making, and AI agentic workflows for automating analysis.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor'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#, Java, Scala, or Python
  
  • OR equivalent experience.
    
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with large-scale streaming platforms such as Apache Spark or Flink.
  
• 4+ years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining machine learning modeling systems and pipeline.
  
• 4+ years of experience as a technical lead, including mentoring and guiding engineers.

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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science