Senior Software Engineer

Azure AI  Search is looking for a senior engineer to join the Azure AI Search team. We’re looking for an engineer passionate about building large-scale, developer-facing cloud services and solving problems at the intersection of Search, AI, distributed systems, and information retrieval in an agile, customer-obsessed environment

Azure AI Search is a global managed search solution. As the hosted search engine on Azure, we make it quick and easy for developers to integrate a robust set of search capabilities into their applications; Think e-commerce sites, data catalogs, large enterprise applications. Over the last few years, the service has gone through tremendous growth, expanding into new market segments, and enabling new customer scenarios. Currently, we are sitting right in center of the AI wave enabling generative AI and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) scenarios driving future growth, we’re working to support a broader range of customer workloads in terms of data and query volume, usage patterns, and hosting modes. Independently, we’re investing heavily to improve key drivers of customer satisfaction including search relevance and developer experience

This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to take the next step in their career and be at the forefront of what Microsoft cares about most: Data, Cloud and AI 

As a team we’re proud of what we build and how we build it. We run lean, obsess about customers and use an evidence-based approach to decision making. Every single week we talk to customers to make sure we build what they want. We leverage open-source technologies, develop in C#, Java and C++, our codebase builds in minutes, and we ship new bits regularly. We hire self-driven engineers ready to take on new challenges, develop ownership, and learn quickly. We reduce the process to a minimum. As an engineer on the team, you’ll spend most of your time writing code, contributing improvements in different dimensions of the service value proposition: core search, manageability, scale, availability, performance, developer experience

You can read more about our culture in this news article: https://aka.ms/azure-search-startup . You can also check out our product page https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search and stack overflow forum https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/azure-cognitive-search to see how developers use search.  Our team consists of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, different professional and life experiences. We maintain and grow that diversity, which makes us better at building the best solutions for our customers while having a blast doing it! Core to our team culture is the belief that you must have a ‘people-first’ approach to sustainably building and running 24x7 cloud services. This means we support each other to build things the right way, only work sane hours, enjoy our vacation time and take advantage of our paid parental leave

Required Qualifications 

• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting and communication skills
• Good understanding of systems fundamentals in either OS, cloud platforms or distributed systems
• Openness to feedback and effectiveness at collaborating with diverse groups of people
• Demonstrated independence, bias for action, and tolerance for ambiguity
• 8+ Years of engineering experience 
• C#, C++, Java, or other object-oriented programming languages; SQL dialects, PowerShell OR automation experience are an advantage
• Building and shipping production grade cloud services, including designing and implementing solutions for telemetry and monitoring
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering (or equivalent experience)

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with Lucene, Elastic search, Open Search and the full ELK stack is a plus 
• Experience building systems on top of with one of the large cloud platforms is a plus 
• Experience coordinating resources across diverse teams to restore service and maintain SLA’s 
• Ability to conceptualize a distributed service, it’s dependencies and the transactional flow when troubleshooting across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage and distributed services layers
• High enthusiasm, integrity, ingenuity, results-orientation, self-motivation, and resourcefulness in a fast-paced environment
• Deep desire to work collaboratively, find win/win solutions and celebrate successes  
• Always leading with deep passion and empathy for customers and co-workers

#AIPlatformHiring

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.

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

Responsibilities 

• Design and deliver new product capabilities to enable new Search workloads in Azure 
• Ensure product and service quality through hands on devOps engagement and building livesite tooling 
• Engage with customers to better understand scenarios and resolve issues 
• Develop expertise in Azure provisioning and service management