Principal Software Engineer (AI Agentic Developer Productivity)

Are you a Software Engineer already at the forefront of agentic AI development someone who uses agents to build software today and wants to build the platform that brings those capabilities to every developer at Microsoft Do you have strong opinions about what great agentic tooling looks like formed from real experience shipping with it Do you want to dogfood the very platform youre building and have your own productivity transformed by it If so wed love to talk with you about this opportunity!

Our AI team is a part of the larger ES365 (Microsoft 365 Engineering Systems) team and we own the agentic engineering platform being adopted across all of Microsoft. ES365 owns the tools and systems used by thousands of Microsoft developers who innovate across the companys largest codebases from source control and check-in experience to build validation and deployment automation. This gives us a unique position to define what AI-powered developer productivity looks like at Microsoft scale.

The ES365 AI team is 100% focused on pushing that frontier. We build the agentic platform itself and the experiences on top of it. The developers and codebase owners who use these tools are your customers just down the hall giving us a tight feedback loop and the domain expertise to move fast. For additional context example workstreams have included AI-assisted large-scale codebase refactoring automated package integrations deep architectural Q&A over codebases and human-in-the-loop directed code changes.

Were a growing team looking for a passionate and experienced Software this role youll help define and build the next generation of our agentic platform orchestrating the latest AI models and harnesses in service of company-wide developer productivity. Youll lead through excellent contributions to the ESAI codebase advocate best practices for agentic development and forge technical and mission-based partnerships with other teams across Microsoft working on related problems.

If you are excited about AIs potential and want to be on the front lines of AI-Powered developer efficiency at Microsoft we want you in ES365 AI.

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.

• Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle including design architecture implementation testability debugging shipping and servicing.
• Use AI in your daily coding and advocate to the team and customers an evolving state-of-the-art of how best to do this.
• Demonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work because no one has tried them before.
• Provide mentorship and coaching to engineers in and beyond your team.
• Write and review clean well-thought-out code with an emphasis on quality performance simplicity durability scalability and maintainability.
• Contribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.

Required 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:

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior experience building with Agent SDKs large language models (LLMs) prompt engineering or AI orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain Semantic Kernel AutoGen LlamaIndex or similar).
• Familiarity with agentic AI development patterns multi-step reasoning tool/function calling retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Proven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale production-quality systems.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals: system design algorithms testing debugging and code review.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.
• Comfort working in ambiguous fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.
• Hands-on experience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants such as:
• GitHub Copilot and Copilot Workspace AI pair programming CLI and task-oriented development
• Claude Code agentic CLI for autonomous software engineering tasks
• OpenAI Codex / ChatGPT LLM-based code generation and explanation
• Cursor AI-native code editor with inline generation and multi-file edits
• Prior experience using agentic plugins agents skills hooks etc.
• Experience dogfooding evaluating and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools and translating those insights into team-wide best practices.
• Background in developer tooling build systems CI/CD pipelines or engineering systems at scale.

#CAP #CAPHiring

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