Microsoft
Principal AI Back-End Network Systems Lead
$143K–$304K
Mountain View, CA +2 · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2026
- Location
- Mountain View, CA
Redmond, WA
Hillsboro, OR - Experience
- Required: 7+ years with a master’s degree, or 8+ years with a bachelor’s degree, or equivalent experience. Preferred: 10+ years relevant experience (or equivalent experience); 6+ years in AI/ML, HPC, accelerator, or large-scale cloud networking.
- Education
- Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field; OR bachelor’s degree in those fields; OR equivalent experience.
- Visa sponsorship
About the job
Leads end-to-end product architecture, development, validation, and deployment of AI back-end networks spanning scale-up and scale-out systems in hyperscale datacenters.
What you'll do
- Own network product definition and execution from workload requirements through architecture, qualification, deployment, and fleet learning.
- Lead integration across accelerator and networking silicon, links, switches, protocols, fabric, software, and AI workloads.
- Set validation and production-readiness strategy, lead cross-layer troubleshooting, and align multidisciplinary teams and partners.
What they ask for
- Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 7+ years of technical engineering experience; OR bachelor’s degree in those fields and 8+ years; OR equivalent experience.
- Meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice to have
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field and 10+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent experience.
- 6+ years designing, developing, integrating, or validating networking for AI/ML, HPC, accelerator, or large-scale cloud systems; deep domain expertise and product leadership experience are also sought.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Ethernet, RDMA/RoCE, SONiC/Linux networking, SerDes/PHY, FEC, NICs/DPUs, switch ASICs, 400G/800G
AI focus
Builds and optimizes scale-up and scale-out networking for AI training and inference, including workload-driven architecture, collective communication, performance modeling, and deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative