Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA +1 · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 9, 2026
- Location
- Redmond, WA
United States - Experience
- 6+ years technical engineering experience; alternatively, equivalent experience. Preferred alternatives include a Master's Degree and 8+ years, or a Bachelor's Degree and 12+ years, or equivalent experience. Also listed as preferred: 5+ years in distributed systems, storage, databases, or cloud infrastructure.
- Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Designs and operates distributed storage platforms for large-scale AI training and inference on Azure, improving performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
What you'll do
- Design and evolve distributed storage systems and file systems for cloud-scale AI workloads, including storage for Kubernetes and GPU clusters.
- Develop storage and key-value caching architectures for LLM inference, and improve service durability, availability, observability, and operational maturity.
- Lead technical architecture and cross-team work, troubleshoot production issues, and mentor engineers.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in a listed language, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Nice to have
- 5+ years designing, building, or operating distributed systems, storage systems, file systems, databases, or cloud infrastructure services.
- Experience with production services, storage reliability concepts, technical leadership, geo-distributed storage, Kubernetes for AI workloads, LLM caching, distributed training, high-performance networking, GPUs, or AI/ML for operations.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Azure, Kubernetes, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python
AI focus
Builds storage and caching infrastructure for foundation-model pre-training, post-training, fine-tuning, and inference; preferred experience includes applying AI techniques to operational tasks.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative