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Principal Software Engineer - Pro-Code Server Engineer

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Mountain View, CA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Principal-level, hands-on pro-code engineering role focused on modernizing long-lived codebases, integrating AI, and raising engineering effectiveness across Microsoft IT Programs (ITP) within OCTO/MCAPS-Core. Lead by writing production code, mentoring, defining standards, building tools, and prototyping solutions to hard engineering problems while ensuring security, privacy, accessibility, and Responsible AI.

Responsibilities

  • Pro-code leadership: Stay deeply hands-on: write production code, review critical changes, debug complex failures, and set the example for pro-code craftsmanship.
  • Mentoring: Mentor engineers across ITP on effective pro-code practice, covering design, code quality, testing, debugging, secure coding, performance, and AI-assisted development. Do this through code and design reviews, pairing, tech talks, and communities of practice.
  • Standards: Develop, publish, and update standards for effective pro-code development. These cover coding conventions, review practices, test automation, CI/CD, observability, secure and Responsible AI development, and AI-assisted coding. Drive adoption and measure it (code health, defect escape rate, lead time).
  • Legacy understanding: Build a deep understanding of mature and legacy codebases, including historical design decisions, compatibility requirements, undocumented dependencies, and operational constraints.
  • Modernization approaches: Define and share repeatable modernization approaches: architectural seams and strangler patterns, characterization tests, incremental refactoring, redesigning untestable code, untangling dependencies, and carefully managed migrations rather than unnecessary rewrites. Turn the lessons learned into playbooks and reference implementations.
  • Tooling: Find friction in the developer workflow and drive the creation of tools, automation, templates, analyzers, and AI-assisted agents and skills. These should speed up code comprehension, test generation, migration, refactoring, review, and release.
  • Prototyping: Prototype solutions to the hardest software engineering problems, such as novel architectures, performance and scale limits, AI integration patterns, and modernization strategies. Prove feasibility, surface risks, and hand off clear designs and reference code to delivery teams or product groups.
  • Design and build scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective services, APIs, orchestration layers, agent runtimes, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks. Balance new capabilities against performance, reliability, maintainability, cost, and backward compatibility.
  • Diagnose and resolve complex cross-system issues involving concurrency, distributed state, dependencies, performance, data quality, and model behavior.
  • Establish safe deployment, progressive exposure, rollback, recovery, monitoring, and end-to-end testing practices for critical production changes.
  • Use telemetry, incident learnings, and quality indicators to measure and improve engineering effectiveness, including the velocity and quality impact of AI-assisted development.

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:Pro-code leadershipMentoringStandards developmentLegacy/codebase modernizationArchitectural modernizationTooling & automationPrototypingSystem design & scalabilityCross-system debuggingDeployment and testingEngineering effectiveness measurement
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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