Principal Software Engineer

As the Principal Software Engineer and technical lead, you will define the long-term technical vision for location services and geospatial platform, drive architectural decisions, and ensure services meet reliability, scalability, and performance requirements.

You will partner with engineering, product, and operations leaders to deliver mission-critical capabilities powering Microsoft's global ecosystem, including AI, Search, and Geospatial Intelligence.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation for large-scale services, ensuring resiliency, observability, and operational excellence.
• Drive cross-team alignment on platform strategy, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Mentor junior engineers and influence engineering culture across the organization.
• Partner with TPMs to define roadmaps, manage dependencies, and de-risk execution.
• Lead deep technical investigations, incident reviews, and long-term reliability improvements.
• Champion agentic coding and automation, build high-leverage engineering systems, and raise the quality bar.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements.

Preferred Qualification:

• 5+ years building and scaling distributed online services.
• Demonstrated ability to influence across multiple engineering organizations.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Expert in service architecture, cloud infrastructure, and data-intensive systems.
• Familiarity with location services, geospatial data, online services, and data pipelines is a strong plus.

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 – $274,800 per year.