Principal Software Engineer, CoreAI

Microsoft Foundry turns AI innovation into real-world impact—and you can help make every unit of usage trustworthy. You will join the team building the platform that helps organizations create and operate AI-powered experiences at scale. You will make complex AI consumption accurate, explainable and dependable for customers and partner teams.

You will shape and implement distributed usage and billing systems that connect model onboarding, metering, processing and reconciliation. As a hands-on technical leader, you will deepen your skills in cloud-scale architecture, event-driven processing, telemetry, recovery, schema evolution, regional validation and cross-team technical leadership. Flexible work options—including remote and in-office arrangements—will be discussed based on the role, work location and applicable Microsoft policies.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, reliable and secure cloud services, setting technical direction for resilient architecture and maintainable software.

• Translate customer and business needs into technical architecture and delivered solutions, balancing long-term service goals with practical execution.

• Collaborate across engineering, product and partner teams to clarify requirements, align interfaces and dependencies, and resolve technical trade-offs.

• Own the end-to-end service lifecycle, from design and implementation through testing, deployment and operations, continuously improving quality and service health.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership through production code, design and code reviews, and mentoring that strengthens engineering judgment and delivery across teams.

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, Python or equivalent experience.

Other requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and at least 8 years of software-development experience using one or more programming languages, or equivalent experience.

• Experience designing, building and operating cloud services, distributed backend services or data-processing systems in production.

• Strong coding and system-design skills, including API and data-model design, automated testing, debugging and maintainable production code.

• Demonstrated ability to improve service reliability through testing, telemetry, incident diagnosis and lasting engineering fixes.

• Hands-on technical ownership from design through production, with experience leading across teams, communicating trade-offs and delivering through collaboration.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with billing, usage metering or reconciliation is preferred, not required.

• Familiarity with AI model usage, token-based measurement, event-driven architectures and cloud-scale telemetry or analytics platforms.

• Experience with resilient processing patterns, replay and recovery, schema evolution, and automated end-to-end validation across deployment regions.

• A record of mentoring engineers and improving engineering quality through practical technical leadership.

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:

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.