Principal Architect

Job ID: 200060621Posted: 2026-10-22Location: United States, California, Mountain ViewSalary: USD $165,600 - $296,400 per yearEmployment type: Full-TimeWork site: 3 days / week in-officeRole type: Individual ContributorTravel: 25-50%Profession: Software EngineeringDiscipline: Software EngineeringCompany: MicrosoftOverviewAt Innovation & Technology Programs (ITP), we build and continually reinvent the technology behind Microsoft's Customer Service & Support (CSS) and Customer Success Unit (CSU) businesses. We sit inside the Office of the CTO (OCTO), part of MCAPS-Core, where product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners come together around one goal: accelerating customer outcomes and business growth. OCTO shapes where Microsoft invests in emerging technology, sets technical direction, and leads the company's highest-priority AI initiatives, with impact reaching across Microsoft, industry, and society. Engineering carries that mission into the technology behind customer support and success, working alongside ITP's strategy, delivery, and productivity teams, and organized around three pillars of its own: Innovation, Production, and a shared Tech Ops function that keeps every squad running. Joining ITP means turning new ideas into production-ready solutions and running technology on a real scale, so customers get to value faster and strengthen loyalty.We are seeking a Partner Architect to define and drive the long-term architecture for business-critical products, platforms, and services. This role brings together the disciplines of Solution Architecture and Software Engineering to translate business strategy, customer needs, product direction, and technology trends into coherent logical and physical architectures that teams can implement and operate at scale.You will lead through technical depth, judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries. You will mentor software engineers, prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems the organization faces and review the most consequential architectural decisions. You will operate from enterprise and ecosystem context down to component topology and implementation detail, providing clarity in ambiguous situations and remaining grounded in engineering reality through design validation, prototypes, code and implementation reviews, operational data, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams.This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an architect who can connect strategy to execution: defining where the platform must go, documenting why, creating standards that scale, and partnering with teams to deliver the architecture incrementally without disrupting customers or business operations.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- Define, launch, and lead the ITP architecture guild as the cross-organization community of practice for architects and senior engineers, owning its charter, membership, cadence, working groups, and operating mechanisms so that standards, patterns, tools, and lessons learned scale across teams.- Set and evolve architectural standards, principles, reference architectures, reusable patterns, approved technology choices, and guardrails that enable consistent, high-quality decisions and reduce ambiguity and rework across teams.- Drive AI adoption and transformation through architecture, defining the AI-first reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails (agents, retrieval, evaluation, and Responsible AI) that teams across ITP, CSS, CSU, and MCAPS use to adopt AI safely and consistently.- Align architecture processes, artifacts, taxonomies, and decision rights across business, engineering, and product groups so that a single architecture practice spans planning, funding, design, delivery, and operations.- Develop, run, and continuously improve the architecture review process, including intake and triage criteria, objective quality bars, the reviewer pool, architecture decision records, escalation paths, and measures of adoption, cycle time, and outcome quality.- Lead reviews of the most consequential products and programs, ensuring decisions are documented with context, options, tradeoffs, risks, and rejected alternatives, and are understood, implemented, measured, and revisited as conditions change.- Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking logical architectures spanning domains, capabilities, bounded contexts, services, data flows, integrations, APIs, identity, security boundaries, and user or system interaction patterns.- Aid teams in creating strong, forward-looking physical architectures spanning deployment topology, compute, storage, networking, data platforms, service placement, geographic distribution, resiliency, observability, disaster recovery, capacity, and operational supportability.- Coach teams in translating functional and nonfunctional requirements into architecture specifications and diagrams that move from enterprise and system context to detailed component, data, network, identity, and deployment views.- Aid in the development of a pro-code golden path: the paved, opinionated, well-documented set of languages, frameworks, platform services, templates, scaffolding, and CI/CD pipelines that represent the supported way to build and ship software in ITP.- Aid in the development of the golden loop: an instrumented inner and outer developer loop spanning local development, AI-assisted coding, code review, test, build, deploy, monitor, and feedback, so that velocity, quality, and developer experience are measurable and continuously improved.- Mentor software engineers across levels, including principal and senior engineers and architects, through design coaching, code and design reviews, pairing, and career guidance, raising architectural capability across the organization- Prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems facing the organization and validate high-risk or novel design elements through working prototypes, benchmarks, modeling, simulations, and technical spikes before teams commit to irreversible paths.- Contribute production-quality reference implementations, templates, and sample code that make the golden path concrete and immediately usable by engineering teams.- Identify architectural gaps, design cliffs, concentration risks, systemic dependencies, obsolete technologies, and accumulated technical debt, and prioritize investments that improve long-term agility and reduce operational and business risk.- Define target-state architecture and sequenced transition roadmaps that connect the current state to the target state through practical, incremental steps while maintaining compatibility, service continuity, and customer trust.- Help teams balance tradeoffs across reliability, security, privacy, safety, accessibility, performance, scalability, sustainability, maintainability, time to market, and total cost of ownership.- Use telemetry, capacity and cost models, reliability data, security findings, incident learnings, customer feedback, and technology-market signals to evaluate architecture health and guide continuous evolution.- Communicate complex architectures and decisions in terms appropriate for engineering, business, and executive audiences, and build trusted technical relationships with senior leaders, customers, and partners.- Represent the organization in strategic architecture discussions and contribute reusable intellectual property, technical guidance, and thought leadership across Microsoft and the broader ecosystem.- Embody our culture and values.To be successful in this role: architecture grounded in engineering. This is not an ivory-tower architecture role. The successful candidate will be able to connect strategy, logical design, and physical design to implementable engineering decisions; validate high-risk assumptions with evidence; and stay engaged through implementation, deployment, operation, and architectural evolution.QualificationsRequired/minimum qualificationsBachelor's 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 equivalent experience.Other requirementMicrosoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s 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 qualificationsMaster's 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.Extensive experience defining logical and physical architectures for large-scale, business-critical enterprise products, platforms, cloud services, or distributed systems.Demonstrated success defining future-state architecture and delivering multi-year transformation or modernization roadmaps across multiple engineering teams or organizational boundaries.Experience establishing and governing architecture principles, design standards, reference architectures, patterns, guardrails, architecture decision records, and technical review practices.Deep understanding of software and distributed-systems design, including service boundaries, APIs, integration patterns, data architecture, identity, networking, deployment topology, resiliency, observability, and operational supportability.Experience translating business, customer, functional, and nonfunctional requirements into implementable architecture specifications, diagrams, decisions, and sequenced delivery plans.Experience making and communicating complex tradeoffs involving reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, and delivery speed.Demonstrated ability to lead and influence senior technical and business stakeholders across organizations without relying on formal reporting authority.Demonstrated ability to embrace change, push boundaries, and continuously improve how teams design, build, and operate software.Hands-on technical experience sufficient to validate designs through prototypes, implementation reviews, code reviews, benchmarks, modeling, or direct work with engineering and operations teams.Experience applying AI-first development practices, such as AI-assisted coding, agentic workflows, and AI-driven testing and code review, and building them into golden paths and standards that teams adopt by default.Experience using operational evidence, including telemetry, incidents, capacity, cost, security findings, and customer signals, to assess architecture health and guide investment decisions. Deep expertise in one or more of the following: cloud platform architecture, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, AI systems, security architecture, networking, developer platforms, or large-scale service engineering. Experience modernizing mature or legacy environments through transition architectures, platform seams, domain decomposition, interface evolution, data migration, and incremental replacement strategies. Experience applying established architecture methods and frameworks, such as the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, TOGAF, domain-driven design, threat modeling, or similar practices. Familiarity with the Microsoft engineering toolchain and services, such as Azure, GitHub and GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. Experience designing platforms and products that span multiple clouds, regions, regulatory boundaries, partner ecosystems, or heterogeneous technology environments. Experience with cloud-native and AI-era architecture patterns, including container orchestration, event-driven systems, API platforms, data and model governance, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and Responsible AI controls. Demonstrated record of anticipating technology shifts and converting emerging capabilities into pragmatic architecture strategy, standards, and investment recommendations. Experience developing architecture maturity models, conformance measures, quality scorecards, automated policy or standards validation, and mechanisms for measuring adoption and effectiveness. Exceptional systems thinking, problem solving, negotiation, written communication, executive presentation, and technical storytelling skills. Experience building and leading an architecture guild, architecture review board, or similar community of practice that sets standards and raises engineering capability across multiple teams. Experience defining a pro-code golden path and an instrumented inner and outer developer loop, including platform engineering, templates, scaffolding, CI/CD, AI-assisted development, and developer-experience measurement. Track record of mentoring software engineers and of prototyping solutions to hard engineering problems under production-relevant conditions. Relevant architecture or cloud certifications are beneficial but do not substitute for demonstrated architectural judgment and delivery impact.Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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.