Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer - AI Frameworks
$166K–$331K
United States · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Nov 4, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years of technical engineering experience; preferred alternatives: 12+ years with a master’s degree, or 15+ years with a bachelor’s degree, or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, OR equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads the technical direction and hands-on delivery of AI framework, performance, benchmarking, and tooling capabilities that improve model onboarding, efficiency, and production reliability.
What you'll do
- Own technical vision, architecture, roadmaps, and execution for AI framework and performance capabilities; lead cross-team alignment and delivery.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through prototyping, implementation, reviews, debugging, and operational readiness; mentor engineers and technical leads.
- Build scalable measurement, automation, and observability capabilities and drive improvements in model onboarding, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++ or Python, OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Nice to have
- Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience; OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience; OR equivalent experience.
- Experience leading complex cross-team initiatives, shipping high-performance or distributed systems, AI/ML workloads and frameworks, and creating reusable platforms.
Pay
USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year (base salary); USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
C++, Python, AI frameworks, compilers, runtimes, NVIDIA, AMD GPUs, Azure
AI focus
Develops and optimizes AI frameworks and systems for frontier AI models, including model onboarding, performance, hardware utilization, and production reliability.
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