Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Overview

Windows is where most of the world's developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. Coding agents, local inference, containerized toolchains and AI-native workflows are all arriving at once and the engineering organizations adopting them fastest are the ones whose experience should be shaping Windows.

The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close that loop directly. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers inside their environments, and own the outcome: the customer's developers and agents running production workloads on Windows.

We are measured on adoption. Not revenue, not renewals, not tickets closed. When a customer's engineering organization moves a real workload onto Windows and keeps it there, that is the result.

This is a founding team. The engineers who join it will define the engagement model rather than inherit one.

As a Senior Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you will own engagements end to end, discovery through production, and carry the team's depth on the developer platform itself: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), the developer environment, provisioning and configuration at scale, toolchain and build performance, and the security, identity and policy controls that too often decide whether a developer stays on Windows or asks for a Mac. When an engineering organization tells us their developers are more productive somewhere else, you are the person who finds out whether that is true, why, and what it takes to change it.

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.

Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

Own forward-deployed engagements end to end

• Discover: embed with a customer's engineering organization to understand their development workflow, their constraints, and what is actually blocking adoption. Establish a clear technical problem statement, a baseline, agreed success measures, and a plan.

• Build: design and implement solutions alongside the customer's engineers. Write the automation, configuration, provisioning logic, integrations and reference implementations. Apply real engineering standards - security, privacy, maintainability, supportability - to work that will outlive the engagement.

• Validate: prove the improvement in the customer's environment with measurement they agree with, not with a demo.

Carry the team's depth on the developer platform

• Be the team's authority on how real development happens on Windows at enterprise scale: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Subsystem for Linux Containers (WSLC), containers and virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration, toolchain and build performance, continuous integration (CI) and inner-loop latency, and the identity, security and endpoint-policy controls that constrain all of it.

• Diagnose the friction that drives developer populations off Windows - whether it originates in the platform, in enterprise configuration, in tooling, or in a gap between them - and fix it at the right layer.

• Build the artifacts customers deploy in production: configuration baselines, provisioning automation, diagnostic tooling, reference environments.

Close the loop with product engineering

• Bring evidence back to Windows, WSL, developer tooling and security product teams with enough rigor - reproductions, traces, measurements, business impact - that it changes what they build.

• Drive fixes, supportability improvements and telemetry additions through to shipping. You keep accountability for the customer outcome, not just the handoff.

Scale what works

• Identify the patterns that repeat across customers and convert them into playbooks, reference configurations, tooling and guidance that serve a far larger population than the accounts you touched.

• Transfer knowledge to other Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE's), to Microsoft field and support teams, and to product groups, so each engagement raises the capability of everyone around it.

Deliver measurable adoption outcomes

• Demonstrate adoption through production developer workloads, telemetry, customer evidence or agreed success measures.

• Build trusted relationships with customer technical leaders, platform teams and the developers themselves - the kind where you get told what is really wrong.

• Communicate findings, tradeoffs, risks and progress clearly to customer engineers, engineering leaders, Microsoft field teams and executives.

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.

Other Requirements

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience with developer platforms and environments across Windows, Linux and macOS, and a clear-eyed view of where each is genuinely better.

• Experience with several of: WSL, containers and virtualization, developer machine provisioning and configuration management, package and dependency management, build systems, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and inner-loop performance.

• Experience with the enterprise controls that shape developer machines - endpoint security and endpoint detection response (EDR), identity and conditional access, application control, network policy - and a record of making developers productive within them rather than around them.

• Experience in a customer-facing engineering role - forward deployed engineering, field engineering, technical consulting, escalation engineering, solutions architecture, or as a technical founder, working directly with another organization's engineers in their environment.

• Experience diagnosing performance and reliability problems using structured methods - telemetry, traces, profiling, Windows Performance Analyzer or comparable tooling in systems you did not write.

• Solid programming and automation ability, with a record of shipping production-quality tooling rather than one-off scripts.

• Demonstrated ability to turn a solution built for one customer into something repeatable that benefits many.

• Experience representing customer needs in product planning and shifting engineering priorities using technical evidence and business impact.

• High agency and comfort with ambiguity - this team does not yet have a playbook, and the first people here will write it.

• The judgement and emotional intelligence to hold a hard conversation with a customer without losing the relationship or the truth.

• Familiarity with the Windows app platform - WinUI, WPF, .NET desktop and with application modernization. Not required for this role, but valuable when a customer's adoption conversation turns to their existing app estate.

• Evidence of learning hard things fast. We do not expect anyone to arrive with every skill listed here. A solid track record of acquiring depth quickly counts as much as depth you already have.

#W+DJOBS

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:

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. (