Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer
$143K–$304K
United States · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 23, 2026
- Experience
- Required: 6+ years technical engineering experience; preferred alternatives include a master's degree and 8+ years, or a bachelor's degree and 12+ years, or equivalent experience. Also preferred: 7+ years in hypervisor, VMM, kernel, or virtualization-stack programming, kernel-mode programming, and security.
- Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field OR equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads architecture and hands-on development of Microsoft’s virtualization platform, especially the hypervisor and VMM, enabling secure, reliable, high-performance virtualization across cloud, operating systems, and hardware.
What you'll do
- Define architecture and deliver foundational virtualization capabilities, including features for the hypervisor, VMM, and OpenVMM.
- Improve platform performance, cost, security, reliability, and quality; diagnose low-level hardware and software interactions and enable components on new silicon.
- Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and cross-team influence across Windows Core, Azure, hardware partners, and the open-source community.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience coding in C, C++, or Rust, including substantial work on systems or platform software OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Nice to have
- 7+ years of experience in hypervisor, VMM, kernel, or virtualization-stack programming, kernel-mode programming, and security.
- Experience with silicon bring-up activities.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
C, C++, Rust, OpenVMM, Hyper-V, Azure, Windows, Linux
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative