Principal Software Engineer

Every minute of every day, customers stake their entire business and reputation on the Microsoft Cloud. The Azure Customer Experience (CXP) team believes that when we meet our high standards for quality and reliability, our customers win. If we falter, our customers fail their end-customers. Our vision is to turn Microsoft Cloud customers into fans. 

We are customer obsessed problem-solvers. We orchestrate deep engagements in areas like incident management, support and enablement. We analyze and amplify those customer voices, both within our own team, and across the Cloud + AI team, bringing the customer connection to the Quality vision for Azure. We innovate ways to scale what we learn across our customer base.  Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are, how we work, and what we enable our customers to achieve. We know that empowering our customers starts with empowering our team to show up authentically, work in ways that are best for them, and achieve their career goals. 

We are the Azure Reliability team. We are a multidisciplinary engineering organization tasked with leading reliability holistically across the Azure platform – our goal is to Make Azure the World’s Safest and Most Reliable Cloud. 

For the most important Azure services and products, Azure Reliability adopts a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach, where skilled teams of software engineers collaborate closely with product development teams to improve the availability, reliability, observability, and operability of our planet-scale distributed systems. 

Azure SRE teams strive to improve reliability fundamentals via software engineering, preferring long-lasting platform improvements delivered as engineering projects over repetitive manual operations. We contribute to the product fundamentals and architecture, share knowledge, and code, and prefer reuse over re-invention, always looking for ways to make what we build useful to multiple teams and products. 

We know that the SRE discipline is evolving; we learn from our peers in industry and aim to contribute to this evolution by innovating on SRE within our group and sharing those innovations in public. 

Our people have a wide variety of professional experiences, and we are interested in meeting candidates with traditional engineering backgrounds and those without. Together we form a varied and talented team, and we want to continue building our diversity with our new hires. We strongly believe that diversity and an environment where everyone can feel safe to contribute their own insights is the key to making the best workplace possible. We know that the best workplace makes the best products and services: not only is it the smart thing to do, but it is also the right thing. 

We are not looking for people who know it all, we are looking for people who want to learn it all. We value the input of people who aren’t afraid to learn all the time and embrace mistakes as they continuously improve both our services and themselves.  If you are excited by this type of challenge and you love to work in groups of people who are similarly excited: come join us!  

• 8+ 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 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 Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration. 

• Experience working with large-scale distributed systems (e.g., cloud computing providers, SaaS services, etc., ideally with millions or billions of users) or similarly complex environments.  

Preferred Qualifications 

• Awareness of, and ability to reason about, modern distributed software design patterns and cloud systems architecture, including microservices, containers, load-balancing, queuing, caching. 
• Experience as a technical lead or engineering manager.  

• Experience working on large and unfamiliar codebases (millions of lines of code)  
• Experience with open-source projects, Kubernetes, Linux and containers is desired. 
• Experience in building, shipping and operating reliable solutions 
• Experience with C#/Java/C/C++/Golang. 
• Experience with data technologies (SQL/NoSQL/etc.), 

• Experience with Azure is a plus. 

#AZCXP #AzRelJobs  

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Billions of users across the world rely on our products, and to meet this demand we design and implement world-class distributed systems.   

As a Software Engineer in one of our Azure SRE teams, you will be responsible for improving the reliability of key Azure products.  

The Azure SRE key focus areas are:  

• Defining our systems’ reliability goals via Service Level Objectives (SLOs).  
• Improving our systems’ production posture via targeted observability and operability enhancements (telemetry, alerting, incident management, change management, safe production changes).  
• Building reusable automation and processes that empower multiple teams to achieve their reliability goals.  
• Influencing the product architecture and roadmap to make sure the customer-experienced reliability is always a key consideration when evolving the product.  
• Contributing to the product code to achieve reliability goals. 

We are looking for engineers passionate about the above areas who are also interested in:  

• Providing technical leadership for engineers across multiple teams within Azure.  
• Mentoring engineers on SRE principles, practices, and tools. 
• Design and develop large scale distributed software services and solutions. 

• Develop “best-in-class” engineering for our services by ensuring that the services and the components are well-defined, modularized, secure, reliable, testable, diagnosable, actively monitored, and reusable. 
• Work closely with our internal/external partners to support the team’s mission. 
• Balance pragmatism with vision; deliver continuous improvements to the team’s process and codebase. 
• Build automation to prevent and/or remediate service problems from becoming production incidents. 
• Gain a working understanding of Microsoft businesses and collaborate with mentors and leaders to contribute to cohesive, end-to-end experiences for our users.