Principal Software Engineer

Azure Storage team is chartered with building, managing, and running the persistent cloud storage for Microsoft Azure cloud. We are one of the foundational services in the Azure Cloud and host data from some of the largest companies in the world plus all of Microsoft’s largest online businesses including Xbox, Teams, and Bing.

Azure Cloud has one of the highest number of data centers amongst all the cloud providers. Azure Storage, which is a massively scalable, highly distributed, ubiquitously accessible storage system, is designed to scale out and serve the entire world with hundreds of thousands of devices in our data centers across the world. This role provides a unique opportunity to work on projects that will help support the scale of Azure Storage to the next level. If you like the challenges of large-scale distributed systems, love to work on new projects where you can define the work, scope, direction, and architect new solutions to make an impact on a massive product like Azure storage, this could be a position for you! You will have an opportunity to make high impact changes on a daily basis as you build a hyperscale storage system that may indirectly or directly be used daily by your friends and family.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about distributed storage systems and eager to be part of our journey to build Azure at zettabyte scale. This role offers the opportunity to design and implement core platform capabilities and critical infrastructure that power Azure Storage services such as Blobs, Disks, Files, Tables, and more. At this scale, engineers tackle some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems, including extreme fault tolerance, consistency at scale, and cost-efficient storage for trillions of objects. You will have a rare opportunity to influence foundational architectural decisions that underpin hyperscale cloud storage used by millions of customers worldwide. To be successful in these areas, you must thrive while solving challenges related to durability, availability and concurrency for a distributed system.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

• Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across products that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Identifies and anticipates blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalates them, communicates how they will impact timelines, and then leads efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them.
• Owns and leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Leads the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions. Leads efforts to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Reviews complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.
• Applies and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.
• Leads efforts for experiments that determine the impact of changes using feature flags/flighting in their code, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value. Drives collaboration efforts with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to ensure incorporation of success and guard rail metrics for experimentation.
• Holds accountability as a designated responsible individual (DRI) and mentors other engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for complex issues. Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues. Coordinates people and resources to ensure DRI responsibilities are covered across teams.

Required Qualifications:

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.