Principal Software Engineer (AI / Agentic Developer Productivity)

Overview

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 you're building and have your own productivity transformed by it? If so, we'd 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 company's 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.

We're a growing team looking for a passionate and experienced Software Engineer . In this role, you'll 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. You'll 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 AI's potential and want to be on the front lines of AI-Powered developer efficiency at Microsoft, we want you in ES365 AI.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's 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.

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.

• Proficient 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.

#GXP #GXPHiring

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800.00 - $274,800.00 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 $188,000.00 - $304,200.00 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. (