Senior Software Engineer

The High Availability (HA) team is a cornerstone of Substrate, dedicated to providing unparallel backend availability and redundancy for M365 clients. Our team continuously explores, designs, validates, and rolls out new backend configurations. We collaborate closely with partners across Fleet, Deployment, Performance, and Capacity teams to define future backend SKUs and configure Exchange Online clusters. We also implement Copilot agents to facilitate telemetry collection and alert mitigation.

HA team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help explore, own, and improve the availability and redundancy of customer data in Substrate. As a member of our team, you will experiment with and deliver next-generation storage solutions, and leverage AI tools to further optimize the storage stack and enhance backend server performance.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 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

• Driving feature initiatives that shape the architecture and operational reliability of Exchange Online’s High Availability component, ensuring robust availability and redundancy across M365 backend servers at industry scale.
• Leading the Remote Spare Manager component, including automating monitoring and recovery of database redundancy, and providing redundancy reports and presentations for the Substrate Core Leadership Team at monthly service reviews.
• Developing production, monitoring, and test code; generating comprehensive reports; and performing in-depth performance analysis across the storage engine, database replication, and networking layers.
• Researching the underlying storage and networking layers to identify opportunities for throughput optimization and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

Required 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.
• 4+ years of software design and development experience with backend services.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience in any object-oriented coding language such as C++, C#, Java, or Python, or equivalent experience with C.
• Experience designing, implementing and supporting services in Cloud environment

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:

• Master'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 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, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Experience deploying and maintaining large-scale distributed solutions
• Expertise in establishing and validating performance metrics for backend systems, including the design and execution of comprehensive testing strategies to assess solution scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
• Excellent analytical skills  
• Structured and methodical approach to software design, passion for building reliable and well-tested code.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits an