Principal Software Engineer

We're seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join our Content Engineering team, focusing on architecting, building, and maintaining next-generation platforms for real-time data delivery that power Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar advertising business.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for large-scale, complex systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Contribute hands-on to core code, complex implementations, and production issue resolution.
• Influence and align multiple teams and stakeholders across organisations through solid technical leadership.
• Partner with Product Management and leadership to translate business goals into robust technical solutions.
• Mentor engineers, raise the technical bar, and promote a culture of engineering excellence.
• Use AI tools and techniques to enhance engineering workflows, automate processes, and unlock new capabilities.
• Continuously refine data pipelines and system architecture to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with Ads and Bing teams to enable new scenarios, integrate shared infrastructure, and deliver unified solutions.
• Provide production support by fixing bugs and resolving live-site issues to ensure system availability and reliability.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Solid SQL expertise, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive and product development experience including memory management, multithreading, and performance optimisation, cloud expertise, AI.
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed, cloud-based systems at scale.
• Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across multiple teams.
• Solid expertise in system architecture, data structures, algorithms, and software design patterns.
• Experience with microservices, data pipelines, or large data systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, version control systems (e.g., Git), and build tools.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with AdTech is a big plus.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency, or mission-critical services.
• Deep knowledge of Azure or other hyperscale cloud platforms.
• Experience with data-intensive systems, machine learning platforms, or large marketplaces.
• Track record of leading major architectural initiatives or platform transformations.
• Solid written and verbal communication skills, including technical design documentation.
• A collaborative team player with curiosity, a growth mindset, and a solid sense of responsibility.
• Exposure to AI/ML concepts and practical application of AI tools to solve modern engineering challenges.