← All roles

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft· Software Engineering
Apply on company site
Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kfull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineer within the Microsoft Dataverse team, contributing to globally distributed services that manage, protect, and optimize the SQL database fleet and compute resources underpinning Dataverse. You will define multi-year technical strategy, own critical areas end-to-end, lead cross-team initiatives, and mentor engineers to raise the bar for security, reliability, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for services that manage and optimize Dataverse’s globally distributed database fleet. Translate that strategy into executable roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
  • Demonstrate strong end-to-end ownership of critical technical areas—from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, operational health, and long-term evolution. Proactively identify gaps, drive issues to closure, and remain accountable for customer and business outcomes.
  • Create clarity in complex and ambiguous engineering spaces by framing problems, gathering and analyzing data, identifying root causes, evaluating tradeoffs, and converting insights into coherent technical strategies and concrete deliverables.
  • Lead complex initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations. Align stakeholders, resolve architectural disagreements, establish clear system boundaries and invariants, and manage dependencies across database, service, infrastructure, security, and compliance domains.
  • Effectively manage competing priorities, balancing strategic engineering investments, customer commitments, live-site issues, technical debt, and operational responsibilities while maintaining high standards for quality and execution.
  • Own quality, security, compliance, reliability, and operability by design. Establish automation and engineering practices for validation, safe deployment and rollback, observability, capacity management, incident response, and continuous improvement of mission-critical services.
  • Multiply the effectiveness of the engineering organization by mentoring engineers, reviewing architecture and code, establishing reusable patterns, simplifying systems, and raising the bar for engineering excellence. Define and validate security, reliability, and correctness invariants for both new and existing systems.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Technical strategy and architectureEnd-to-end ownershipCross-team leadership and influenceSecurity, reliability, and operability by design
Last updated Oct 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Microsoft

Cloud ComputingConsumer ElectronicsSoftwareTechnologyliquid-ai-recruiting-target
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Microsoft