Principal Software Engineer

Overview Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be, and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and sky-is-the-limit thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

Microsoft's Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging and real-time analytics, and business intelligence.

The products in our portfolio include Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications, and driving a data culture.

Within Microsoft Fabric, the Azure Monitor team builds services that enable customers to monitor, detect, troubleshoot, and mitigate issues with their services through an increasingly agentic experience. Azure Monitor includes Log Analytics, Application Insights, Container Insights, Hosted Prometheus, Azure Managed Grafana, and more. Additionally, Azure Monitor is the platform upon which Microsoft Sentinel is built.

We have a multi-billion dollar business that is growing rapidly, and we run some of the world’s highest scale observability services both for Microsoft internally and for our external customers, processing over 1.5 Exabytes of logs daily and tracking over 100 billion active metrics.

Within the Azure Monitor team, we are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help build and drive the next generation of our Azure Monitor backend systems.

This role is ideal for someone who can own complex, globally distributed systems end to end, drive architecture across teams, improve reliability and security at scale, and shape how AI-assisted and AI-agentic capabilities are safely applied to infrastructure operations. You will work on services that have to continue to scale for usage with the entire fleet, enabling telemetry scenarios for every workload.

We embrace a fast-paced, startup-like culture focused on shipping early and often, with an emphasis on attention to detail, introspection, and accountability. Collaboration is at the heart of our team. We build on each other's ideas and empower engineers to innovate from the ground up, delivering world-class value at speed.

If you're passionate about building the systems that power Azure's observability and health at hyperscale and thrive in an environment that values creativity, collaboration, and technical excellence, we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, deploy, and operate highly available distributed services and automation used to configure and migrate large-scale telemetry workloads that will be leveraged across the fleet.
• Build and enhance APIs, tools, and subsystems for telemetry collection, routing, storage, and efficient data access.
• Integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., machine learning–based anomaly detection and data validation) to enhance platform intelligence and insights.
• Implement robust monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics and ensure production services run reliably, including participation in on-call rotations and incident response.
• Collaborate with partner teams to deliver end-to-end observability solutions and contribute to design reviews and best practices that uphold high engineering standards.
• Help evolve how the team builds with AI, championing agentic development practices and sharing repeatable patterns that improve engineering velocity and quality, as well as training and evolving AI to assist with non-coding scenarios such as site reliability engineering, support and administration.
• Drive the next generation of our backend systems and mentor engineers, contribute to technical design reviews, and communicate clearly with cross-organization stakeholders about tradeoffs, risks, sequencing, and delivery.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum 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, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Job Requirements

Other & Additional

The ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements is 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/Additional Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Proven experience with Rust and AKS is a plus.
• Experience building and enhancing APIs, tools, and subsystems for telemetry collection, routing, storage, and efficient data access.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, distributed systems, or large-scale production services.
• Experience improving reliability, security, observability, networking, or operational excellence for live services.
• Experience partnering across teams to deliver infrastructure capabilities with clear ownership and supportability.
• Experience mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, and driving cross-team architectural alignment.

#azdat

#azuredata

#azuremonitor

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.