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Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Microsoft· Site Reliability Engineering
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Redmond, WA, Reston, VA$142.8k - $274.8kfull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Principal SRE at Substrate, responsible for defining technical and operational reliability direction across Substrate workloads, influencing architecture, reliability strategy, and engineering practices in highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices across Substrate workloads in highly regulated environments.
  • Serve as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer (OCE), participating in on-call rotations and leading incident response for Substrate services in regulated environments.
  • Provide hands-on leadership during the most complex or high-impact incidents, setting technical direction and response strategy.
  • Drive high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable, systemic engineering improvements across teams.
  • Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions.
  • Drive architectural decisions and define software engineering standards that make reliability, security, and compliance intrinsic to Substrate services.
  • Influence service design and engineering decisions across organizational boundaries.
  • Mentor senior and principal engineers and shape the long-term technical direction of the SRE discipline.
  • Represent Substrate SRE perspectives with senior leadership and cross-functional partners.

Qualifications

  • Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Reliability strategyOn-call incident responseLeadership and mentoring
Nice to have:Architectural decision making

Benefits

  • Microsoft Cloud Background Check required on hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
  • Active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance required.
  • Citizenship verification due to government agency requirements.
  • Eligibility for site-specific compensation and benefits per location (see pay ranges).
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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