Microsoft
Principal ML Engineer
$166K–$331K
Redmond, WA · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 23, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years with a bachelor’s degree, 6+ years with a master’s degree, or 5+ years with a doctorate; or equivalent experience. Preferred: 12+ years with a master’s degree or 8+ years with a doctorate; or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads the architecture and technical direction of Copilot Discover platforms that ingest, rank, personalize, and serve content across Microsoft surfaces.
What you'll do
- Set end-to-end platform architecture and multi-year technical roadmaps, governing design decisions across teams.
- Establish reliability, quality, and operational standards, including testing, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and live-site health.
- Guide adoption of AI/ML for content understanding, personalization, summarization, and safety; align architecture across Microsoft organizations.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in a listed or related field and 8+ years of related experience, or a master’s degree and 6+ years, or a doctorate and 5+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, including data pipelines, microservices, APIs, and storage systems.
- Demonstrated technical leadership and ability to influence across teams and organizations.
- Experience with system architecture, performance tuning, telemetry design, and operational excellence.
Nice to have
- Experience with content platforms, personalization systems, or consumer-facing services at scale.
- Exposure to ML/AI systems, especially content understanding, ranking, or personalization.
Pay
USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year (base salary); USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Apache Spark, Kafka, columnar storage, data modeling, schema evolution, microservices, APIs, CI/CD
AI focus
Shape adoption of AI/ML for content understanding, personalization, summarization, and safety.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative