Principal Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

The Foundry and Inference Training (FIT) team within Microsoft AI Infrastructure builds the platforms systems and operating mechanisms that enable teams to develop train deploy and run AI services at scale.

The FIT Infrastructure team builds storage and accelerated-compute platforms for large-scale AI training and inference on Azure. You will work across distributed storage Kubernetes GPU clusters networking and cloud-scale systems to deliver secure reliable high-performance and cost-efficient infrastructure.

As a Principal Software Engineer Storage Infrastructure you will design build and operate storage platforms for foundation-model pre-training post-training fine-tuning and inference. You will partner with Azure infrastructure networking operating systems and AI platform teams to solve challenging problems in storage performance reliability scalability and developer productivity. This role offers opportunities to shape platform architecture deepen expertise in distributed systems and grow your technical leadership through broad cross-team impact.

Microsofts mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and were 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 build and evolve distributed storage systems and file systems for cloud-scale AI training and inference workloads.
• Architect and operationalize storage stacks for large Kubernetes clusters optimizing data access throughput latency scalability and reliability for GPU-accelerated workloads.
• Design storage and KVkey-value caching architectures that improve LLM inference latency throughput resource utilization and cost efficiency.
• Improve durability availability performance and operational maturity through automation observability diagnostics incident response and resiliency engineering.
• Analyze complex cross-layer production issues identify root causes and implement durable improvements across storage compute networking and runtime components.
• Partner with infrastructure and machine learningLLM platform teams to deliver end-to-end capabilities for foundation-model pre-training post-training fine-tuning and inference.
• Lead architecture reviews influence long-term storage strategy mentor engineers and establish engineering practices for secure and reliable cloud services.

• Embody our Cultureand Values

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 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.
    Additional or preferred qualifications

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.
• 5 years of experience designing building or operating distributed systems storage systems file systems databases or cloud infrastructure services.
• Experience operating highly available fault-tolerant services in production environments including troubleshooting complex distributed-system failures.
• Experience applying storage concepts such as durability replication consistency performance and reliability to production system design.
• Experience leading technical design reviews or delivering cross-team engineering projects across software infrastructure networking or platform components.
• Experience with geo-distributed storage architectures replication disaster recovery business continuity or regional failover.
• Experience designing storage platforms for large-scale Kubernetes clusters supporting AI training or inference.
• Experience with high-performance caching or key-value KV caching for LLM inference.
• Familiarity with distributed training or inference technologies including collective communication libraries and model data or pipeline parallelism.
• Familiarity with high-throughput networking and low-latency communication technologies such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) InfiniBand or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE).
• Familiarity with GPU-accelerated environments including CUDA GPU drivers Kubernetes device plugins or container runtime integration.
• Experience using machine learning or AI techniques for anomaly detection forecasting incident management capacity planning or operational automation.

  #AIINFRA

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