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Principal Software Engineer - AI Frameworks

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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United States$165.6k - $296.4kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Hands-on technical leadership role focused on AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling to improve model velocity, platform efficiency, and production reliability across AI workloads and hardware platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities.
  • Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners accountable to clear decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
  • Build technical leadership capacity across the organization by mentoring engineers, developing emerging technical leads, establishing high standards for quality and maintainability, and creating an inclusive engineering culture in which teams can execute effectively at scale.
  • Steer ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon; set technical priorities, resolve trade-offs, and drive teams to decisions.
  • Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting the engineering approach, delegating and unblocking critical work, and directly contributing through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness.
  • Spearhead common measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities.
  • Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
  • Identify, innovate and productize new modeling and optimization opportunities for frontier AI models.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Architectural leadershipSoftware engineeringAI/ML workloadsC++Python

Benefits

  • Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.
  • Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
  • Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
Last updated Oct 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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