Microsoft
Senior & Principal Software Engineer - Systems & Infrastructure
$120K–$304K
Mountain View, CA · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 8, 2026
- Experience
- 4+ years required. Preferred alternatives: 6+ years with a Master's Degree, or 8+ 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
Leads the architecture, development, and operation of large-scale infrastructure and distributed systems that support Microsoft products and AI services.
What you'll do
- Set technical strategy and design secure, reliable, cost-efficient distributed infrastructure.
- Improve observability, testing, production operations, and automation; diagnose incidents and prevent recurrence.
- Collaborate across teams, mentor engineers, contribute to open-source projects, and improve infrastructure for AI workloads.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 4+ 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
- Master's Degree and 6+ years of technical engineering experience, or Bachelor's Degree and 8+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Experience with large-scale distributed systems, backend or infrastructure technologies, cloud/container/data-processing platforms, open source, or AI/ML infrastructure.
Pay
USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year (base salary); USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year (base salary); USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python
AI focus
Build infrastructure for AI workloads and collaborate to improve performance, efficiency, and reliability, including model inference.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative