Principal Software Architect, Platform Engineering

Overview

Come build, from scratch, the AI-first developer platform that lets thousands of engineers ship faster and safer.

We're a new Platform Engineering team building an internal developer platform, golden paths, and the developer experience for the Microsoft engineering teams behind the world's largest and most complex commerce platforms. Empower the teams that build the copilots and agents that tens of thousands of sellers, partners, and support people rely on around the world every day — global scale and reach with unbounded opportunity to make meaningful impact. The mandate is real, and the appetite is there, from leaders and teams: take the KTLO and toil out of engineers' days, make safe deployment the easy path, and make agent-driven workflows the default for how we build.

We run the platform as a product — teams pick it up because it's useful, not because they're told to. What's open is the technical frontier: agents change what a platform can even do. A platform used to be bounded by what you could deterministically wire across systems, with the gaps left to people to glue by hand. Now agents can carry that ambiguous, cross-system work, and building greenfield, we get to work out how much more a platform can take on.

If you'd rather ship and learn than ask permission, and you're as curious about what teams and work become in this shift as you are about the tech itself, this is the rare seat where you get to define the thing, not just run it.

Why this role

• You earn adoption where it's hardest. The teams with the most complex, highest-stakes systems have the most to gain from the platform and the most reason to be skeptical of it. Your job is to make it genuinely the best way for them to build, and to win them over the way platform-as-a-product should: because it's useful, not because anyone told them to.

• You're a software engineer first. This is a hands-on role. You prototype, write the code that proves the design, and drive the agents that do the heavy lifting. You design by building. If your architecture lives in slides, this isn't your seat.

• You partner, you don't parachute in. You work alongside strong product teams on their hardest problems, in their systems and their domain. They know the domain; you bring platform and agentic-architecture leverage. The best designs come out of that partnership, and you've helped write the code, not just the diagram.

• You prove what teams can newly build with agents. The open question is what becomes possible once agents carry the cross-system work that used to fall to people. You help real teams get there, and turn what works into patterns everyone can reuse.

Responsibilities

• Work with product teams to find the highest-leverage places to modernize onto the platform, and shape the future-state architecture together.

• Prototype and build. Write the proof-of-concept, the reference implementation, and the code that de-risks the hard calls.

• Pair with product teams and forward-deployed architects on their toughest problems, contributing designs and maintainable code others build on.

• Own how systems compose on the platform — the cross-cutting dependencies, sequencing, and interfaces — and keep it coherent in the code, not just the design docs.

• Own outcomes as a DRI: take on-call for what you help ship, mentor the engineers you work with, and hold reliability, observability, and performance as systems move.

• Feed what you learn on the hardest problems back into the platform, so the golden paths get better and the next team has it easier.

• Bring agents into the work where they earn it: the migration and integration they can own, and the guardrails for the parts they can't.

What we're looking for

• A builder-architect, software engineer at the core. You've re-architected large, complex systems and shipped the code to prove it, not just drawn the target state.

• AI-native. You've shipped production software with generative AI and agents, and you know where to point them so they carry the work that used to eat engineers' time.

• The judgment to take on a high-stakes modernization with a team and sequence it safely, built on deep distributed-systems, microservices, and cloud fundamentals (Azure a plus).

• You do your best work embedded with a team, close to the code and close to the people who know the domain.

• The credibility to shape architectural direction across teams as an individual contributor, earned through what you design and ship.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience coding in languages such as 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 qualifcations

• Master'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.

• Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build production software.

• Experience building and operating complex systems, platforms, or cloud infrastructure at scale, including hands-on re-architectures or migrations.

• Depth in distributed systems, microservices, and cloud infrastructure, including CI/CD (Azure a plus).

#EEOPE

Come build the platform that makes every engineer ship faster — and help define what a developer platform even is in the age of agents.

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. (