Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 30, 2026
- Experience
- Required: 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding, or equivalent experience. Preferred: 8+ years with a Master's Degree, 12+ years with a Bachelor's Degree, or equivalent experience; also 4+ years building or operating large-scale distributed databases.
- Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field OR equivalent experience.
About the job
Lead hands-on improvements to the Azure Cosmos DB tier powering Microsoft’s AI plugin registry, reducing throttling while improving reliability and latency.
What you'll do
- Reduce RU consumption and throttling through query, index, partition, data-model, and storage changes; measure fixes in production.
- Improve resilience and performance with batching, caching, caller budgets, telemetry, and zero-downtime migrations.
- Lead data-tier incident response in a 24/7 on-call rotation; mentor engineers and create AI skills and use agentic tools to accelerate database engineering.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
- Position is based in Redmond, Washington and requires being in the office a minimum of 3 days per week.
- 24/7 on-call service is required.
Nice to have
- Master's Degree and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or Bachelor's Degree and 12+ years, or equivalent experience.
- 4+ years building or operating large-scale distributed databases; experience with database throttling, partitioning, performance, and zero-downtime migrations; proficiency in C# and .NET.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Blob Storage, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Apache Cassandra, C#, .NET, Azure Functions
AI focus
Write AI skills to review designs and code for Cosmos DB issues and identify high-RU queries; use agentic tools to build and validate fixes faster, following Responsible AI practices.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative