New

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft
$165,600.00 - $296,400.00 / yr
United States, Washington, Redmond
Sep 03, 2026
Overview The Commerce Financial Platform organization builds intelligent, scalable services & experiences that power Microsoft's commerce needs endtoend. We're accelerating a new era of AIdriven business applications-grounded in data, built for collaboration, and designed to simplify complex workflows across CRM/ERP scenarios. If you're excited to shape how people interact with AI at enterprise scale, continuously improve processes and deliver products . Responsibilities Responsibilities Design and ship AI systems endtoend-from exploration to production-spanning LLMbased services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and robust evaluation/observability. Build agentic and toolusing workflows that reason across data and services, optimizing for safety, latency, and cost at cloud scale (Azure preferred). Collaborate across research and product teams to adapt/finetune models (LLMs/SLMs, multimodal) for real customer scenarios. Lead technical direction across features and services; mentor engineers; champion high engineering standards, reliability, and accessible, inclusive experiences. Uphold Responsible AI, secure and compliance practices in design, data handling, and experimentation. Participate in oncall/operational excellence as part of a healthy, sustainable engineering culture; lead by example. Qualifications Required Qualifications Bachelor'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. Preferred Qualifications: 8+ years building and shipping production software/services including 3+ years with modern ML (e.g., transformerbased LLMs) and applied AI/ML systems. Strong coding skills in one or more: Python, C#, or C++-with design/architecture experience for cloud services (Azure preferred). Handson experience taking LLM/ML features from prototype to production (evaluation, safety, telemetry, and iterative improvement). Ability to influence across teams and drive ambiguous, multipartner initiatives to outcomes. Experience with agentic systems, model/tool orchestration, and/or retrievalaugmented generation (RAG). Expertise with Azure AI, vector stores, prompt/response evaluation, and performance optimization for LLM workloads. Track record of shipping applied research to production and partnering with research teams on custom/finetuned models. Familiarity with Responsible AI practices and inclusive design/accessibility standards. 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. #MicrosoftAI #MicrosoftCOO 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: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay 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.