The posting
Overview
Join the Azure AI Platform air-gapped engineering team as a Principal Software Engineer and help shape how Microsoft delivers and operates advanced AI capabilities for some of its most security-sensitive customers. Our team delivers Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure AI Services in sovereign and air-gapped cloud environments, enabling mission-critical government workloads through secure, reliable AI infrastructure.
In this role, you will provide hands-on technical leadership across a broad portfolio of AI services and supporting infrastructure. You will identify challenges that span service boundaries, establish technical direction for significant engineering initiatives, and lead solutions from early investigation through production adoption. Your work will help make new capabilities easier to deliver, services more reliable to operate, and engineering improvements reusable across the portfolio.
We are looking for an engineer who combines deep software engineering expertise with the ability to reason across unfamiliar systems, make sound decisions under ambiguity, and build alignment across teams. You will partner with Azure AI product and infrastructure teams to address architectural gaps, influence service designs, and incorporate sovereign-cloud requirements into shared solutions. Success means delivering durable technical improvements while developing other engineers and reducing reliance on individual expertise or repeated manual intervention.
This is an individual contributor role with substantial hands-on engineering responsibility. You will write and review code, lead complex investigations, and remain accountable for how solutions perform in production.
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
- Set technical direction across services. Identify systemic constraints and define architectural approaches that improve the security, reliability, scalability, and maintainability of AI services in sovereign and air-gapped environments. Balance immediate customer needs with sustainable long-term investment.
- Lead complex initiatives from ambiguity to adoption. Turn loosely defined problems into clear technical proposals, delivery plans, and measurable outcomes. Resolve dependencies and risks across teams, and remain accountable through implementation, validation, rollout, and operational follow-through.
- Remain a hands-on engineering leader. Design and implement critical software and infrastructure changes, work effectively across multiple codebases, and establish sound engineering practices through code reviews, design reviews, testing, and documentation.
- Build solutions that benefit multiple services. Develop and drive adoption of reusable deployment frameworks, release validation, observability, and operational automation. Replace recurring manual work and service-specific workarounds with maintainable shared capabilities where appropriate.
- Influence architecture beyond the immediate team. Partner with product and infrastructure owners to address sovereign-cloud requirements in shared service designs, resolve cross-service incompatibilities, and reduce unnecessary divergence between cloud environments.
- Strengthen production reliability. Participate in on-call rotations and provide technical leadership during complex incidents. Connect recurring failures to architectural or engineering gaps, and drive improvements that reduce customer impact, recovery time, and operational burden.
- Develop engineering capability. Mentor engineers, help technical leads evaluate tradeoffs, and share knowledge across service boundaries. Build clear ownership and documentation so systems can be operated and evolved without depending on a small number of experts.
- Apply AI-assisted engineering responsibly. Evaluate and use approved tools, including GitHub Copilot, to improve development and operational workflows, with appropriate validation, security controls, and measures of effectiveness.
- Embody Microsoft’s culture and values, fostering an inclusive environment where engineers challenge assumptions, learn from evidence, and collaborate toward shared outcomes.
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.
Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able 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:
- The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Top Secret Clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) based on a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) with Polygraph. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required pre-offer and post-hire for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate U.S. Government clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
- Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
- Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience shaping technical roadmaps and securing cross-team alignment on architectural changes, shared infrastructure, or engineering standards.
- Experience delivering services in sovereign, air-gapped, regulated, or otherwise constrained environments, including managing differences in dependencies, identity, networking, and deployment infrastructure.
- Experience building reusable platforms, deployment automation, CI/CD pipelines, validation frameworks, or observability capabilities adopted by multiple services or teams.
- Experience operating containerized services using technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes on Azure or comparable cloud platforms.
- Experience improving production reliability through incident analysis, resilient design, safe rollout practices, and measurable reductions in recurring operational work.
- Experience with AI service infrastructure, model delivery, inference platforms, or related distributed systems.
- Demonstrated impact through mentoring engineers, guiding technical leads, and improving engineering practices beyond an individual project.
Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
