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Principal Data Engineering Architect

Microsoft· Data Engineering
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Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Lead architecture and hands-on development of petabyte-scale systems processing billions of events per day for Microsoft Marketing data products, shaping data architecture, modeling, solution design and data products with technical direction across partner teams.

Responsibilities

  • Partner with PMs and business users to define problems, connect requests to customer journeys and business outcomes, and prioritize reusable capabilities. Use feedback, adoption, reuse and quality measures to guide product decisions and team data strategy.
  • Lead solution design and production implementation of major data capabilities. Build hands-on prototypes, contribute production code, review code, models and designs, and remain accountable for operational reliability and measurable product outcomes.
  • Develop logical, physical and semantic models for foundational marketing domains. Productize engagement signals with clear business definitions, metric logic, contracts and ownership so analysts, applications and AI consumers can use data without guessing its meaning.
  • Design distributed processing and storage using streaming, batch or combined patterns. Apply immutable event data and flexible schema evolution to protect downstream products. Make explicit tradeoffs among latency, accuracy, reliability, cost and maintainability.
  • Influence engineering and user-facing tools for governed self-service ingestion, publishing and extension of platform data. Improve discovery, access and user experience through interoperable templates, interfaces and semantic abstractions that preserve domain ownership.
  • Embed security, privacy and quality by design, including metadata, lineage, classification, policy-aware access and retention. Establish monitoring and engineering practices that make federated products trustworthy, supportable and cost-conscious throughout their lifecycle.
  • Advance AI automation and governed code generation for transformations, tests, documentation and self-service data extension. Use bounded assistance for operational detection and recommendations, with rigorous validation, approved remediation and human judgment for consequential changes. Measure delivery and operational improvements.
  • Bring a startup mindset to a large, complex data environment: listen, simplify, iterate quickly and make sound decisions. Mentor and coach engineers, strengthen reviews and standards, and align partner teams through technical credibility and collaboration.

Qualifications

  • Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering
  • OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Big-data processingSQLProgramming
Nice to have:Data governance

Benefits

  • Data Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
  • Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
  • Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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