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Principal Optical Network System Engineer

Microsoft· Hardware Engineering
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Hybrid (United States, California, Mountain View), Hybrid (United States, Washington, Redmond), Hybrid (United States, Oregon, Hillsboro)$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Lead architecture, engineering, productization, and deployment of optical interconnect solutions and rack-scale fiber management for next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure. Owns product development lifecycle from concept through qualification, manufacturing readiness, and large-scale production deployment. Collaborates across silicon, systems, networking, platform architecture, datacenter engineering, manufacturing, and external partners to translate platform requirements into scalable optical products.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive networking architectures for AI training and inference platforms, spanning scale-up and scale-out deployments. Partner across architecture, silicon, firmware, software, and Azure infrastructure teams to deliver networking solutions from concept through datacenter deployment while influencing future networking roadmaps.
  • Lead the integration, bring-up, and deployment of network hardware technologies including switches, NICs, PHYs, high-speed SerDes interfaces, optics, cables, and backplane solutions. Collaborate with internal teams, ODMs, and technology partners to ensure successful qualification and production readiness.
  • Define and execute validation strategies for AI networking infrastructure, including functional, performance, scale, interoperability, reliability, and stress testing. Develop automated qualification frameworks and methodologies to ensure robust operation in rack-scale and cluster-scale AI environments.
  • Analyze and optimize AI fabric performance across distributed training and inference workloads. Evaluate latency, bandwidth utilization, congestion behavior, and collective communication efficiency, translating workload requirements into scalable networking solutions and architecture recommendations.
  • Drive qualification and deployment of next-generation networking technologies, including high-speed copper and optical interconnects, PAM4-based SerDes, advanced optics, and future networking innovations such as LPO, LRO, CPO, and silicon photonics. Evaluate technology tradeoffs across performance, power, reliability, and scalability.
  • Lead root-cause analysis of networking and AI fabric issues spanning physical layer, network protocols, and distributed AI communication layers. Develop telemetry, diagnostics, automation, and fleet monitoring solutions that improve network reliability, accelerate issue resolution, and enhance engineering productivity.

Qualifications

  • Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 7+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience OR equivalent experience
  • 8+ years of experience with fiber optics, including related tools, devices, processes, design, deployment, operations, or manufacturing.
  • 8+ years of experience designing, testing, validating, or troubleshooting optical interconnects, optical components, or end-to-end fiber links.

Skills

Required:Networking architecture for AI platformsFiber optics and optical interconnectsSystem bring-up and integration of network hardware

Benefits

  • Open to benefits and compensation information provided by Microsoft pay ranges (base salary, location adjustments).
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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