Senior Software Engineer - Substrate Store

Overview We are the Store team within Microsoft’s Substrate Storage Fabric—the core platform that powers Microsoft 365 experiences, from AI-powered Copilot innovations to Outlook and Teams. Our team focuses on API optimization, Azure-based search, and strengthening the security of the storage access path.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help modernize Store Access. If you’re passionate about building latency-critical access APIs and high-throughput services that run on both bare-metal infrastructure and Azure at global scale, this role offers the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the platform behind Microsoft 365.

In this role, you will own significant components from design through implementation and production operation. You will collaborate across teams to solve complex distributed-systems problems, make sound technical decisions that balance performance, reliability, security, and maintainability, and deliver measurable improvements to service quality.

You will contribute to architectural direction, mentor engineers, and strengthen engineering practices through thoughtful design reviews, testing, observability, and safe deployment.

At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver Store Access modernization — own significant components of latency-critical access APIs, search on Azure, and integrations with the broader Substrate Storage Fabric and Microsoft 365 services.
• Optimize API performance at scale — design and implement high-throughput, low-latency APIs using appropriate concurrency, resource governance, caching, and back-pressure mechanisms, balancing performance, cost, and reliability.
• Build and improve search systems on Azure — contribute to architectural direction and own features that improve index freshness, query performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate on cross-team technical decisions — work with partner teams to define interfaces, resolve dependencies, and deliver designs that meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, security, privacy, compliance, and accessibility requirements.
• Demonstrate strong engineering craftsmanship — write maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code in C# and Rust; provide thoughtful code and design reviews; and mentor engineers in sound development practices.
• Own production quality for your components — develop telemetry, dashboards, alerts, and quality metrics to validate improvements, detect latency and security regressions, and support effective troubleshooting and service operation.
• Apply AI-assisted development responsibly — use and evaluate AI tools to improve engineering productivity and quality while validating generated requirements, designs, code, tests, and operational assets against established engineering and security standards.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and optimizing high-throughput, low-latency APIs and services, including concurrency control, resource management, caching, and API contracts.
• Solid proficiency in C# and/or Rust, with a solid understanding of system performance, memory management, concurrency, and multithreading.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, observability, testing, and safe deployment practices.
• Demonstrated experience owning significant software components from technical design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Experience troubleshooting production issues and participating in on-call support for customer-facing services.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, provide effective code and design reviews, and collaborate across teams to resolve technical challenges and deliver shared outcomes.

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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.