Principal Software Engineer - Dynamics Customer Experience Applications team

Job ID: 200048649Posted: 2026-08-25Location: United States, Washington, RedmondSalary: USD $142,800 - $274,800 per yearEmployment type: Full-TimeWork site: 3 days / week in-officeRole type: Individual ContributorTravel: Less than 25%Profession: Software EngineeringDiscipline: Software EngineeringCompany: MicrosoftOverviewDynamics 365 is Microsoft’s suite of enterprise software that powers many of the largest businesses in the world. The Customer Experience Applications Team delivers Dynamics 365 Contact Center, an AI-first solution that lets our customers run intelligent and highly scalable contact centers. We are building the next generation of our applications running on Azure that pull together Dynamics 365, Office 365 and a number of other Microsoft cloud services to deliver high value, complete, and predictive application scenarios across all devices and form factors.   D365 Contact Center is a robust application that extends the power of CRM’s like Dynamics 365 Customer Service to enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like Live Chat, Voice, and SMS.  As a Principal Software Engineer in the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Experience Applications team, you will provide technical leadership for the architecture, design, implementation, and operation of intelligent capabilities within Dynamics 365 Contact Center. You will solve ambiguous, high-impact engineering problems spanning distributed cloud services, applied AI, data, security, and reliability. You will set technical direction, align partner teams, and lead delivery of secure, scalable, production-ready systems that create measurable customer and business impact.We innovate quickly and collaborate closely with our partners and customers in a very agile environment. If the opportunity to collaborate with a diverse engineering team, on enabling end-to-end business scenarios using cutting-edge AI first technologies and to solve problems for large scale 24x7 business SaaS applications excite you, we would love to talk to you!   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. ResponsibilitiesAs a Principal Software Engineer in the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Experience Applications team, you will define and drive the technical strategy for intelligent, globally distributed services that power Dynamics 365 Contact Center. You will lead through influence, raise engineering standards, and partner across disciplines and organizations to deliver durable customer outcomes.Define and evolve the end-to-end architecture for complex, AI-enabled customer experience capabilities, making sound trade-offs across scale, latency, availability, security, cost, and time to market.Demonstrate strong end-to-end ownership for critical technical areas, from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, operational health, and long-term improvement. Proactively identify gaps, drive issues to closure, and remain accountable for customer and business outcomes.Effectively manage multiple priorities and competing demands, balancing strategic engineering investments, customer commitments, live-site issues, and operational responsibilities while maintaining high standards for quality and execution.Adapt quickly to shifting priorities and business needs, making clear trade-offs, re-planning effectively, and redirecting engineering efforts when customer impact, reliability, security, or business priorities change.Operate with urgency and sound judgment in ambiguous environments, independently identifying what needs to be done, bringing the right partners together, and driving execution without waiting for detailed direction.Lead implementation of critical platform components, producing high-quality production code, and resolving the most complex design, performance, and debugging challenges across distributed systems.Drive technical strategy across teams and organizations, translating business and customer needs into coherent multi-release investments, interfaces, and engineering plans.Provide technical leadership for applied AI systems, including model and framework selection, evaluation, grounding, orchestration, responsible AI controls, monitoring, and lifecycle management.Own quality, security, compliance, and operability by design, establishing automation, validation, deployment, observability, incident response, and safe rollout practices for mission-critical services.Lead resolution of high-severity live-site and customer issues, coordinating across dependencies, driving root-cause analysis, and converting operational learning into systemic prevention.Multiply the effectiveness of the engineering organization by mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture and code, establishing reusable patterns, simplifying systems, and raising standards for engineering excellence.Architecture and Technical Strategy: Deep experience defining architecture for distributed systems and driving technical decisions across organizational boundaries.Applied AI and AI Operations: Experience shipping generative AI, large language model, or agentic capabilities with rigorous evaluation, safety, monitoring, and lifecycle practices.Cloud and Infrastructure: Expertise building and operating highly available services on Azure or another major cloud, including containers, data platforms, networking, security, and observability.Engineering Excellence: Demonstrated ability to improve quality, reliability, security, maintainability, and developer productivity across a substantial engineering area.Leadership and Influence: Proven ability to communicate complex technical topics, build alignment among senior stakeholders, mentor engineers, and lead through influence across teams and time zones.Customer and Business Impact: Experience translating customer scenarios into platform investments and leading response to complex enterprise or live-site issues.Problem Solving: Exceptional coding, debugging, systems thinking, and decision-making skills in ambiguous, high-impact environments.QualificationsRequired 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 PythonOR 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:Master'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 PythonOR Bachelor'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 equivalent experience. Experience architecting and delivering large-scale, production cloud services, including technical leadership across multiple teams or complex dependencies.Experience designing, building, and troubleshooting scalable, resilient, event-driven systems, including asynchronous processing, observability, audio streaming, recording, and media-processing workflows.Effective use of tools such as GitHub Copilot and Claude for implementation, debugging, code reviews, and rapid prototyping, experiments, developing end to end test scenariosDemonstrated experuence and ownership from requirements through production deployment, with expertise in diagnosing complex cross-service failures using logs, telemetry, correlation IDs, and distributed traces, supported by comprehensive unit, integration, functional, and end-to-end testing.Demonstrated experience and expertise in WebSockets, gRPC, GitHub-based CI/CD workflows, and Azure Service Fabric, including real-time communication, streaming, authentication, connection lifecycle management, microservice deployment, scaling, upgrades, health monitoring, and production troublesSoftware Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 - $304,200 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.