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Principal Software Engineer - CoreAI

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Redmond, WA, Hybrid (Multiple Locations)$142.8k - $274.8kfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the database layer of a first‑party Azure service built on Azure SQL, focusing on reliability, performance, and scale.

Responsibilities

  • Own the availability, durability, and performance of large‑scale Azure SQL databases supporting a production Azure service.
  • Lead deep performance tuning efforts, including query plan analysis, indexing strategies, concurrency control, stored procedure optimization, and workload isolation.
  • Diagnose and resolve complex issues such as deadlocks, blocking, resource contention, latency spikes, memory pressure, and failover behaviors.
  • Define and drive capacity planning models, performance guardrails, and growth readiness strategies.
  • Partner with software engineers and architects to influence how the service uses Azure SQL, including schema design, access patterns, transaction boundaries, and consistency models.
  • Review and guide database‑related design proposals with a focus on long‑term reliability, operability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
  • Advocate for engineering solutions that reduce ongoing operational burden and eliminate repetitive manual work.
  • Lead the design and execution of safe, automated schema changes, configuration updates, and data migrations on live, highly available systems.
  • Establish rollout, validation, and rollback strategies that minimize customer impact and operational risk.
  • Anticipate migration risks and proactively design mitigations before issues surface in production.
  • Define and evolve deep Azure SQL telemetry, including latency, throughput, waits, failures, saturation signals, and early‑warning indicators.
  • Use data to proactively identify reliability risks, performance regressions, and emerging capacity constraints.
  • Partner with SREs to integrate database health signals into service‑level monitoring and reliability models.
  • Serve as the database technical authority during live‑site incidents and on‑call rotations.
  • Lead root cause analysis for database‑related outages and reliability events.
  • Identify and reduce database technical debt to improve maintainability, predictability, and operational simplicity.
  • Build reusable tooling, automation, and standards that improve database operations across the service.
  • Share best practices, documentation, and learnings to raise the reliability bar beyond your immediate team.

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:Azure SQLDatabase performance tuning
Nice to have:Distributed systems fundamentals (replication, failover, durability, consistency)Online schema changes and data migrationsIncident response and root cause analysisSRE collaboration and reliability modelingAutomation and tooling for database operationsMentoring and technical leadership
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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