Principal Software Engineer - Azure Core

Calling all Software Engineers with a passion for pushing the boundaries of cloud technology. Join our dynamic team at Azure and be at the forefront of building the next generation cloud that will redefine how businesses scale, collaborate, and thrive. 

Azure Core is the engine of Microsoft’s Cloud.  Azure Core powers infrastructure that is the foundation for cloud computing. Within Azure, you will define and validate the hardware and virtualization technologies that provide computational capabilities for Azure. You will directly contribute to the architecture of new systems as part of the core Azure infrastructure, including hardware platforms and virtualization. You will learn about the challenges that affect operations at a global scale and help design and optimize the next generation Microsoft Azure offerings. You will also learn what it takes to support new business models, applications, and operating models as we bring new customers and partners into the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. 

There are many teams within Azure that collaborate and expand the cloud service: 

• Compute Platform Team builds the control plane and lifecycle management of key resources including Virtual Machines, Scale Sets, Images, and Serverless containers. The capabilities built by the Compute Platform Team are leveraged by all customer workloads on Azure cloud. 
• Azure Storage team is chartered with building and operating the persistent storage for the entire Microsoft Azure cloud! Azure Storage consists of a platform which currently powers six different storage services – Files, Disks, Blobs, Data Lake, Tables, and Queues. 
• Azure Core Compute Node Services team is responsible for materializing and managing customer-facing compute resources as virtual machines, containers and bare metal servers. We actively explore forward-looking technologies, evolving the host OS while utilizing hardware offloads and leveraging disaggregation. 
• Azure Compute Hardware Platform Innovation defines and validates the hardware and virtualization technologies that provide computational capabilities for Azure. You will work with partners and customers to deliver innovative solutions and find ways to improve efficiency. 
• Azure networking Software Defined Networking is responsible for building virtual network solutions on Azure. The solution set includes virtual network, virtual network connectivity, network security configuration, route configuration, secure access (i.e. private link ) etc. The list continues to grow while we enrich our virtual network offerings. Virtual network solutions are used by every single customer running on Azure.  

We work at a startup pace with the focus to ship early and often. We are building a culture around delivering customer value in a differentiated and highly competitive way. As a result, attention to scalability, resiliency, security and agility is highly valued for candidates. Our team fosters collaborative environment and builds upon one-another's ideas, to deliver world-class customer value at a rapid pace. We empower engineers to deliver creative solutions through innovation. 
 
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. #azurecorejobs 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND technical engineering experience with coding in at least one language including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. 
• Experience designing complex software services and components. 
• Experience in design of large scale distributed systems 
• Experience building services hosted in Cloud. 
• Strong passion for delivering high-quality, large-scale services in cloud applications. 
• Strong analytical, problem solving and organizational skills.  
• Ability to deal with the ambiguity associated with working in a fast-paced and changing environment.  

 Preferred Qualifications: 

• Prior experience with mentoring team members. Experience in improving efficiency, creating clarity, and driving cross team collaboration to achieve results. 
• Knowledge of Performance profiling tools 
• Excellent customer and partner focus - able to understand their needs through a data driven approach. 
• Ability to organize and implement integration tests and resolve problem areas 
• Demonstrated problem solving skills 
• Experience with Machine learning/AI 

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. 

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders determine user requirements and features for a set of scenarios. 
• Leads the design and building distributed services that are secure, scalable, reliable, and performant. 
• Creates, implements, optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to establish and improve performance and resilience, maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). 
• Defines customer success metrics and engineering services to meet and exceed the goals. 
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features and partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items. 
• Partners with other teams to build integrated end-to-end experiences.  
• Leverage performance and profiling tools to identify hot spots and bottlenecks across hardware and software boundaries. 
• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. 
• Operates services in production, meeting a high bar on monitoring, detection, and resolution of issues with live services. 
• Leads by example and mentor others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. 
• Independently creates and mentor others for a clear and articulated plan for building high quality solutions. 
• Communicates clearly, accurately, and timely in written and spoken forms. 
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, resilience, efficiency, observability, and performance of cloud services while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.