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Principal Software Engineer - AKS Flex: High Scale

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Multiple Locations$142.8k - $274.8kfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Lead architecture and scale of AKS Flex control plane, etcd, and Unbounded platform to manage large, geographically distributed node fleets and remote machines; contribute to open-source community and drive multi-year technical roadmap.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture for control plane scalability and the flex nodes and Unbounded platform, 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 compute, storage, networking, and identity, driving alignment on interfaces, tradeoffs, and sequencing.
  • Make and defend key architectural decisions around correctness, durability, security, scale limits, and failure modes, and establish the design review and quality bar for the area.
  • Represent Microsoft in upstream communities (such as Kubernetes SIG Scalability, SIG etcd, SIG API Machinery, and the Unbounded project), driving proposals and building consensus with external maintainers.
  • Mentor and grow senior engineers, and raise the technical capability of the broader team.
  • Push the limits of cluster scale by improving the performance, reliability, and efficiency of etcd and the Kubernetes API server under large node counts, high object churn, and heavy watch traffic.
  • Analyze and optimize control plane bottlenecks such as write amplification, compaction and defragmentation, watch fan-out, list/relist storms, request prioritization, and storage and memory pressure.
  • Lead the design and validation of architectural changes to the control plane storage layer, including approaches to partitioning, offloading, and caching state, while preserving correctness and durability guarantees.
  • Build scale and performance testing infrastructure, benchmarks, and SLOs that let us measure control plane limits and prevent regressions before they reach customers.
  • Build automation for safe etcd operations at fleet scale: backup and restore, member replacement, quorum recovery, upgrades, and repair.
  • Design and build the systems that let worker nodes in other Azure regions, on-premises data centers, edge locations, and other clouds securely join an AKS cluster and behave as standard node pools.
  • Build node provisioning and day-2 lifecycle automation across diverse substrates: SSH-based bootstrap, cloud API provisioning in response to unschedulable pods, and bare-metal PXE boot with BMC power management and TPM-based attestation.
  • Design Kubernetes-native APIs, controllers, and CRDs that make remote machines declaratively manageable with standard tooling, and that scale efficiently as fleets grow.
  • Solve the control plane challenges of remote nodes: high and variable latency, intermittent connectivity, node heartbeats and status churn, node identity and authentication, secure bootstrap, and safe upgrades across heterogeneous hardware including GPUs.
  • Contribute to and help lead the Unbounded open-source project, including design discussions, code reviews, and community engagement.
  • 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.
  • Drive engineering culture through technical design, code reviews, and setting standards for reliability and operational excellence across the area.

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#, Java, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience

Skills

Required:Go, Rust, C++, C#, Java, or Python programming
Nice to have:Etcd internalsStorage systems and databasesKubernetes control plane internalsPerformance engineering
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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