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Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Redmond, WA$165.6k - $296.4kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across Build and the broader Windows engineering ecosystem, defining architectural direction, leading multi-quarter initiatives, and solving ambiguous engineering problems spanning organizational and technical boundaries within Windows Engineering Systems Build team.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive the technical strategy and architecture for foundational build tools, services, and engineering workflows used across Windows and partner organizations.
  • Lead multi-quarter initiatives that modernize critical engineering systems while improving reliability, performance, security, maintainability, observability, and developer experience.
  • Identify systemic opportunities across the engineering ecosystem and translate ambiguous business, developer, and operational needs into clear technical direction and durable platform investments.
  • Design and deliver solutions across build orchestration, distributed execution, caching, compilers, toolchains, dependency management, artifact production, diagnostics, and engineering infrastructure.
  • Diagnose complex and high-impact failures across organizational and technology boundaries, driving investigations from initial evidence through root cause, remediation, and prevention.
  • Establish architectural principles, engineering standards, and technical decision frameworks that enable teams to evolve critical systems safely and consistently.
  • Partner with Windows product teams, security organizations, and Engineering Systems teams to integrate new capabilities while protecting compatibility, scale, and operational continuity.
  • Establish measurable success criteria, telemetry, and operational signals that make reliability, performance, adoption, regressions, and customer impact visible.
  • Advance secure software-supply-chain practices, including dependency governance, provenance, artifact integrity, policy enforcement, and compliance automation.
  • Provide technical leadership during significant operational events, helping teams understand failure modes, make sound tradeoffs, and implement systemic reliability improvements.
  • Use and advance AI-assisted engineering workflows for investigation, implementation, review, diagnostics, and operational response while maintaining rigorous validation, security, and engineering judgment.
  • Influence technical decisions across teams and organizations by clearly communicating architecture, risks, tradeoffs, priorities, and long-term consequences to both technical and nontechnical audiences.
  • Develop and mentor engineers and technical leaders through architecture and code reviews, debugging, project leadership, career development, and thoughtful delegation of technical ownership.
  • Multiply the effectiveness of the broader engineering organization by creating reusable designs, tools, diagnostics, documentation, and engineering practices.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ 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:Architectural strategy
Nice to have:Windows internals / native software developmentDevOps / CI/CDTelemetry / diagnosticsLeadership / mentoring
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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