Principal SWE Lead

MCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product engineering marketing sales customer success and partners around a common customer mission we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution we win competitively capture market share and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption strengthen loyalty and create sustainable competitive advantage driving growth that outpaces the market.

Within MCAPS - Core the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support CSS we are powered by Microsofts AI technology to help consumers businesses partners and more resolve their issues quickly and securely helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

Microsofts SCIM organization is seeking a Principal Software AI Engineer to lead the architecture development and production deployment of agentic AI solutions that transform support experiences. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who can solve ambiguous high-impact problems; set engineering direction; and translate support experience intent and readiness requirements into secure reliable and scalable AI systems.
You will combine deep software engineering expertise with applied AI judgment to build diagnostics workflows evaluation frameworks and tooling that improve how support teams and customers resolve complex issues. You will work across engineering product program management data security Responsible AI and frontline support teams influencing technical strategy while remaining close to implementation.

This role is suited to a principal-level engineer who combines strategic influence with deep hands-on execution. The ideal candidate is energized by ambiguous problems makes sound architectural tradeoffs learns rapidly as AI technologies evolve and maintains a high bar for customer impact and operational excellence.

Microsofts 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.

• Architect and build production-grade AI systems. Design implement and operate agentic AI solutions diagnostic experiences orchestration workflows and supporting platforms using governed ProCode and citizen-development technologies where appropriate.
• Set technical direction. Define architecture engineering strategy design principles and reusable patterns for AI solutions that must operate securely and reliably at enterprise scale.
• Lead through code and engineering rigor. Develop critical components conduct design and code reviews establish testing standards and resolve the most complex technical and architectural issues.
• Integrate with the support ecosystem. Connect AI solutions to Microsoft support systems APIs knowledge sources telemetry and enterprise data while ensuring appropriate access controls and data handling.
• Advance agent orchestration and diagnostics. Solve difficult problems in planning context and state management tool use multi-agent coordination retrieval grounding observability and failure recovery.
• Build robust evaluation capabilities. Establish technical unit integration regression and end-to-end testing for prompts models tools orchestration flows and system integrations.
• Validate quality and readiness. Evaluate groundedness accuracy task completion robustness latency cost safety and failure modes at each deployment milestone in partnership with TPMs and support-domain experts.
• Deliver enterprise-ready solutions. Deploy and operate services in Microsoft cloud environments in accordance with security privacy compliance Responsible AI reliability and scalability requirements.
• Define measurable outcomes. Establish success metrics and telemetry that demonstrate customer value support effectiveness engineering health operational readiness and suitability for scale.
• Drive operational excellence. Create monitoring incident response debugging and continuous-improvement mechanisms for AI systems in production.
• Influence across organizations. Partner with senior leaders and cross-functional teams to align priorities manage technical tradeoffs and deliver strategic initiatives spanning multiple organizations.
• Grow engineering capability. Mentor engineers raise the technical bar promote thoughtful experimentation and build a culture of inclusive collaboration knowledge sharing and high-quality execution.
• Document for long-term success. Maintain clear architecture design decisions limitations evaluation evidence deployment guidance and operational runbooks.

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelors 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

Other Qualifications

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the roles job duties.
• 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.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Masters 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 Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12 years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including but not limited to C C C# Java JavaScript or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Hands-on experience building applied AI systems including generative AI large language models or autonomous agents.
• 10 years of professional software design and development experience including architecture and delivery of complex production systems.
• Experience designing building deploying and operating highly available secure and scalable cloud services
• Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages with the ability to contribute directly to production code; experience with Python is highly relevant.
• Experience with distributed systems APIs data platforms observability testing and production operations.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical decisions to engineering product business and executive audiences.
• Experience with Azure AI Foundry Copilot Studio Power Platform Azure services or comparable enterprise AI and cloud platforms.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following: agent platforms multi-agent orchestration retrieval-augmented generation knowledge systems AI evaluation prompt engineering model selection or ML infrastructure.
• Exerience developing evaluation frameworks and quality gates for generative AI including groundedness safety robustness and task-success measurement.
• Experience integrating AI solutions with enterprise systems security boundaries identity data governance and compliance controls.
• Experience building AI-powered diagnostics customer support service operations or workflow automation solutions.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142800 - $274800 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 $188000 - $304200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
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.

Required Experience:

IC