Principal Software Engineer

Transforming Productivity with Innovation

Embark on a journey with Microsoft’s Substrate Intelligence Platform (DSX) team. We are at the forefront of integrating advanced large language models and cloud services to create secure, personalized, and scalable experiences across Microsoft 365 applications including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Our Mission

We are pioneering the infrastructure that allows for tenant-isolated fine-tuning, empowering customers to customize Copilot agents with ease and security. Our work encompasses support for leading OpenAI models and open-source alternatives, ensuring unmatched capabilities for our users.

Key Focus Areas

• Data extraction and isolation
• Secure training and evaluation workflows
• Model deployment, migration, and lifecycle management

Our systems operate on a large scale in multi-tenant environments with a strong emphasis on security and compliance. We strategically manage GPU resources and facilitate the seamless onboarding of new models and customers.

Your Impact

In a pivotal technical leadership role, you will help shape the future of Copilot’s fine-tuning and evaluation infrastructure. Your responsibilities will include:

• Setting technical direction for core platform components.
• Influencing architecture and design decisions across teams.
• Tackling complex problems at the intersection of AI infrastructure, security, scale, and reliability.
• Enabling Copilot scenarios that unlock customer value and new revenue streams.

You will collaborate with multiple partner teams, including Azure Machine Learning and Security & Compliance, to drive alignment on essential technical concerns.

Core Responsibilities

• Architecting large-scale, distributed services for fine-tuning and evaluation workflows.
• Owning the complete technical spectrum from data ingestion to monitoring.
• Defining secure data movement patterns that comply with established standards.
• Establishing a long-term vision and roadmap for the Heron fine-tuning platform.
• Leading cross-team technical reviews and promoting best practices.
• Developing frameworks for operational excellence.
• Mentoring engineers while raising the bar on design quality and engineering rigor.
• Collaborating with stakeholders to convert business goals into effective technical strategies.
• Proactively resolving systemic production issues to ensure long-term reliability.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field, along with hands-on experience in coding languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or an equivalent background.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated capability to lead technical decisions across diverse teams or services.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field, or a Bachelor’s Degree with substantial technical experience.
• Experience in building platform or infrastructure services within cloud environments, particularly Azure.
• Understanding of multi-tenant architectures and privacy-compliant design.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Machine Learning, Kubernetes, and large-scale data pipelines.
• A track record of improving architecture simplicity and reliability at scale.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and influence effectively.

We uphold Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization to achieve more, fostering a culture of growth, inclusion, and respect.

Equal Opportunity Commitment

We are dedicated to providing equal employment opportunities for all individuals. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to any characteristic protected by law, ensuring an inclusive work environment for all.