Principal Software Engineer--M365 Foundation Team

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead the strategic evolution of the Experimentation and Configuration Service (ECS), Microsoft’s platform for safe, scalable, intelligent, and resilient configuration management.

As a Principal Software Engineer in ECS, you will be accountable for broad technical direction across a major platform area or cross-team initiative. You will lead complex architecture from ideation to production, create clarity across teams, drive multi-release technical strategy, and influence engineering practices across ECS and partner organizations.

This role is for a technical leader who can operate in ambiguous problem spaces, broker difficult cross-team architecture decisions, and change the momentum of current plans toward higher-impact outcomes. You will help ECS evolve into an agentic-native Continuous Configuration platform for Microsoft services, combining distributed systems expertise, operational excellence, AI-native development, and customer-focused platform strategy.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Technical Leadership: Define and drive the architecture, roadmap, and execution strategy for a major ECS platform area or cross-team initiative with multi-release impact.
• Cross-Team Architecture Ownership: Broker complex architecture decisions across ECS, partner teams, PM, security, compliance, and service owners; create shared direction and durable technical alignment.
• Agentic-Native Platform Transformation: Lead the design and adoption of agentic-native engineering systems, including AI coding agents, MCP interfaces, SKILLs, intelligent automation, and AI-native engineering practices such as harness engineering, loop engineering, and evaluation systems.
• Technical Vision & Long-Term Direction: Translate ambiguous customer, business, security, reliability, and operational needs into clear technical bets, phased execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Platform Quality & Engineering Excellence: Define quality metrics, coding patterns, validation strategy, telemetry, observability, and operational readiness standards that raise the engineering bar across ECS.
• Complex Problem Resolution: Resolve the hardest technical and product-system problems in ECS, including issues spanning distributed systems, scale, reliability, security, compliance, and cross-service dependencies.
• Customer & Partner Influence: Build trusted technical relationships with major partner teams and use customer insights, production signals, and platform adoption data to improve ECS strategy and design.
• Organizational Impact: Change the momentum of existing plans where needed, identify higher-impact directions, and help teams pivot toward better customer and business outcomes.
• Mentorship & Capability Building: Mentor senior engineers and tech leads, build durable technical capability across the team, and create an inclusive engineering environment where people can do their best work.
• Operational Accountability: Ensure ECS platform investments are designed for production excellence, measurable customer impact, cost awareness, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications

Required 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 Python or equivalent experience.
• Proven experience leading architecture and delivery of large-scale cloud services, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure across multiple teams.
• Deep technical expertise in service architecture, reliability engineering, distributed systems, telemetry, security, scalability, and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives, create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, and influence senior technical stakeholders.
• Solid coding and design judgment, with a track record of delivering simple, maintainable, high-quality technical solutions.
• Experience adopting or leading AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, automation platforms, or intelligent engineering systems.

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 Python
• OR 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 with configuration management, experimentation platforms, feature rollout systems, policy engines, SDKs, service control planes, or large-scale developer platforms.
• Experience defining multi-year technical strategy, architecture direction, or engineering standards across product groups.
• Experience with Copilot, AI agents, MCP, SKILLs, autonomous troubleshooting, self-healing systems, AI-native platform engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, evaluation platforms, or agentic software development frameworks.
• Proven ability to drive reliability, compliance, security, and operational excellence for mission-critical services.
• Solid ability to synthesize production data, customer feedback, and business priorities into actionable technical strategy.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers, growing technical leaders, and shaping engineering culture.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially for executive-level technical narratives, design reviews, and cross-org decision making.