Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer, ML & Distributed Systems
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 1, 2026
- Experience
- 6+ years required; preferred alternatives are 8+ years with a master's degree or 12+ years with a bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Designs, deploys, and operates production machine-learning models and hyperscale distributed services that power Microsoft AI experiences.
What you'll do
- Build and operationalize ML models, LLM evaluation pipelines, and model-serving infrastructure.
- Architect and operate reliable, low-latency distributed services, APIs, and data pipelines at hyperscale.
- Monitor live services, plan capacity, respond to incidents, and collaborate across teams while mentoring engineers.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding, or equivalent experience.
- Proven experience designing, developing, and operating multi-tiered distributed services at scale.
- Hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating production ML systems.
- Experience with full product cycles and LLM application patterns, including prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and model evaluation frameworks.
Nice to have
- Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding, or bachelor's degree and 12+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Experience with ML infrastructure, large-scale data systems, and experimentation platforms.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Kubernetes, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Redis
AI focus
Develop and productionize ML and deep learning models; refine LLM prompting and fine-tuning; build evaluation, inference, and serving systems; optimize model quality, latency, and cost.
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