Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer - Performance
$166K–$331K
United States · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 15, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years of technical engineering experience; preferred alternatives are 12+ years with a Master's Degree, 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 to improve model performance, reliability, and Azure efficiency.
What you'll do
- Set technical vision, architecture, roadmaps, and multi-release execution plans for AI performance capabilities.
- Lead cross-team investigations and delivery, aligning stakeholders and guiding engineers through architectural decisions and implementation.
- Develop scalable measurement, automation, and observability capabilities and drive measurable production improvements.
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 passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Nice to have
- Master's Degree and 12+ years of technical engineering experience, or Bachelor's Degree and 15+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Experience leading complex cross-team initiatives and shipping high-performance or distributed systems; expertise in software and computer architecture, accelerator-aware optimization, and AI/ML workloads and frameworks.
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, Azure
AI focus
Leads AI framework and inference performance work, benchmarking, and tooling to improve model velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative