Principal Software Engineer, Integration and Automation - AI Infrastructure

Overview Software development is entering a new era in which artificial intelligence can automate routine engineering work and help teams deliver reliable software faster. On the Integration and Automation team, you will build intelligent automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery systems, validation services, and developer platforms for complex engineering environments. You will work with engineers and partner teams to improve build, test, deployment, and production workflows at scale while advancing code intelligence and retrieval capabilities that give engineers and intelligent agents the context to make dependable changes. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Integration and Automation team, you will design, build, and operate artificial intelligence-powered automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery systems, distributed services, developer tooling, and code-intelligence capabilities. You will own one or more significant services or technologies within the team’s domain, lead technical design and delivery, improve engineering workflows using measurable evidence, and partner across teams to deliver dependable platforms at scale. In this role, you will deepen your expertise in artificial intelligence-enabled software engineering, develop technical leadership in large-scale service architecture and operations, and hone your ability to turn ambiguous engineering problems into dependable production outcomes. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day, we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. Responsibilities Own significant systems from design through production operation. Work across artificial intelligence automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery, distributed services, developer tooling, reliability, and code intelligence while contributing to architecture, engineering practices, and technical decisions within the team’s domain. Own a core capability end to end. Lead architecture, design documentation, implementation, quality, and operational health for services or technologies within a defined platform area, including artificial intelligence workflow automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery orchestration, build and validation services, developer experiences, code intelligence, or production operations. Lead technical reviews, contribute to roadmap decisions, and communicate trade-offs involving cost, latency, reliability, and quality. Improve engineering workflow quality with evidence. Build evaluation and validation systems for artificial intelligence-assisted changes, builds, tests, deployments, and code-intelligence experiences. Use measurable results to improve automation accuracy, release confidence, developer efficiency, and platform reliability. Scale automation and delivery platforms. Design systems that support large repositories, high-volume builds, parallel validation, dependable deployments, branch-aware workflows, resilient external integrations, rate-limit management, and effective cost controls. Operate a reliable production service. Define service-level objectives, alerts, runbooks, and incident practices. Strengthen multitenant authentication, secrets management, and network policy, and participate in on-call ownership for the systems you build. Integrate with engineering workflows. Expose automation, validation, delivery, and code-intelligence capabilities through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and application programming interfaces (APIs), connect to existing developer and continuous integration and continuous delivery systems, and translate partner feedback into practical platform improvements. Raise engineering standards and help the team deliver high-value work. Provide substantive code and design reviews, mentor engineers, model strong practices in testing, observability, migrations, and release discipline, identify technical gaps, develop proposals, build alignment with partner teams, and drive agreed solutions through delivery. Qualifications Required 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 Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. Preferred Qualifications: 5+ years of experience building, testing, launching, and operating backend services or data-intensive systems in production. Experience owning the design and architecture of a significant system, including writing design documents and leading technical reviews. Experience in one or more of the following areas: distributed systems and concurrency; continuous integration and continuous delivery platforms; workflow orchestration or developer automation; large-scale data pipelines; cloud-native containerized services on Kubernetes; or search, retrieval, and code intelligence. Demonstrated ability to define an ambiguous problem and drive it through implementation, launch, and measurable results. Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field. 5+ years of experience delivering production software in one or more of the following areas: artificial intelligence-enabled automation, agentic workflows, automated software engineering tasks, evaluation frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, embedding pipelines, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Experience operating vector, graph, or relational databases at scale, such as Qdrant, FAISS, Neo4j, or PostgreSQL. Experience building or operating continuous integration and continuous delivery systems, build and test infrastructure, release automation, deployment orchestration, policy gates, developer self-service platforms, or cloud services using infrastructure as code and Kubernetes deployment tooling. Experience with Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) service design, FastAPI or similar frameworks, and TypeScript and React front ends. Experience building developer tools, engineering automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery platforms, build or test systems, static analysis, code search, or code-intelligence products. Experience leading a technical workstream, mentoring engineers, or serving as the recognized owner of a system used by other teams. #AIINFRA Software 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 Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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 Th