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Principal Software Engineer - Networking

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Hybrid (United States)$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineer to design and build the networking for AKS Flex and Unbounded, enabling multi-site Kubernetes across diverse environments with high-performance fabrics and secure, scalable overlay/underlay networking.

Responsibilities

  • Own the networking architecture for flex nodes and Unbounded, and help define the multi-year technical roadmap for AKS Flex in partnership with product and engineering leadership.
  • Lead cross-organization design efforts spanning AKS, Azure networking, compute, and identity, driving alignment on interfaces, tradeoffs, and sequencing.
  • Build multi-site networking that gives pods transparent connectivity across sites, using encrypted overlays (e.g., WireGuard), tunneling (GENEVE, VXLAN, IPIP), direct L3 routing, BGP, and eBPF dataplanes.
  • Design networking for nodes that live far from their control plane, handling high and variable latency, intermittent connectivity, partial partitions, NAT traversal, and secure communication with the API server.
  • Drive the performance, scale, and reliability of the networking dataplane and control plane across a global fleet, including throughput, latency, encryption overhead, and route and policy scale.
  • Integrate high-performance fabrics such as InfiniBand and RDMA for distributed AI training and inference across heterogeneous and remote hardware.
  • Participate in production operations and on-call rotations, turning operational learnings into durable engineering improvements.
  • Partner across AKS and Azure teams to deliver secure, compliant, and resilient infrastructure.

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, Go, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python - OR equivalent experience

Skills

Required:Networking architectureEncrypted overlays (WireGuard)Tunneling (GENEVE, VXLAN, IPIP)BGPeBPF dataplanes
Nice to have:InfiniBand/RDMALinux networking stackContainers/Kubernetes
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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