Principal Software Engineer Networking jobs at Microsoft

work on highly strategic and industry-relevant projects. If you excel at solving complex problems, writing high-

systems using the latest technologies, we would like to hear from you. You will also be responsible to build AI

edge AI technology.

tackle our next set of significant challenges. You will be empowered to envision, design, code, validate, and

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience in software engineering practices, coding and solid foundation in data structures and algorithms, with problem solving, debugging and analytical skills.

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/Additional Qualifications

• Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Proficiency in C++ or similar languages with memory management and address manipulation. Familiarity with system level coding, troubleshooting and debugging, multithreading and high-performance backend systems.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

• Collaborate with stakeholders to determine user requirements for various scenarios.

• Drive the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for products, applications, services, or platforms.

• Create, implement, optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to enhance performance, maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI).

• Leverage subject-matter expertise of product features and partner with stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive project plans, release plans, and work items for the workgroup.

• Act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and guide other engineers by developing and following the playbook, working on call to monitor systems/products/services for degradation, downtime, or interruptions, alerting stakeholders about status, and initiating actions to restore systems/products/services for both simple and complex problems when appropriate.

• Proactively seek new knowledge and adapt to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns to improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale.

• Lead by example, engage in discussions on the architecture of products or solutions, and apply engineering principles to establish robust and maintainable architecture and designs.

• Overcome roadblocks to deliver work to users quickly and iteratively.

• Drive, coach, and mentor others through design reviews, code reviews, and test case reviews.

• Design, develop, and operationalize the deployment of complex, enterprise-grade cloud services that leverage multiple services and platforms, ensuring high availability, scalability, robustness, and observability.

• Be responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of these services, ensuring their scalability, reliability, and security.

• Drive improvements for systems and engineering processes with simplicity and maintainability as core tenets.

• Deliver value through a collaborative approach spanning multiple teams across geographies.

• Be a role model for an open, honest, and inclusive approach to problem-solving.

• Support and influence the team culture towards customer-centricity and continuous improvement.

• Implement practices that ensure accurate, safe, and efficient releases for our services.

As a Software Engineer II in this team, you will contribute to Azure host networking infrastructure by designing and deploying agents that integrate hardware and software components to ensure consistent and efficient networking for current and future Azure hosts. You will also develop Network Interface Card (NIC) servicing software to support AI and other Azure workloads at scale.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, Rust, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 1+ year(s) technical experience working in low level systems development (Ex. networking, drivers, etc.).
• 1+ year(s) technical experience with computer networking, and general cloud technologies.

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:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
  • OR related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++,Rust C#, Java, JavaScript, OR Python
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 22, 2025.

• Works with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of features.
• Contributes to the identification of dependencies, and the development of design documents for a product area with little oversight.
• Creates and implements code for a product, service, or feature, reusing code as applicable.
• Contributes to efforts to break down larger work items into smaller work items and provides estimation.
• Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) working on-call to monitor system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions and gains approval to restore system/product/service for simple problems.
• Remains current in skills by investing time and effort into staying abreast of current developments that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) team, you will help build secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-native infrastructure. Your focus will be on cross-cutting security concerns across the AKS stack, including designing and implementing secure-by-default features, improving threat modeling, and integrating artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tooling to enhance security workflows. You will collaborate with engineers across the stack to build libraries, services, and automation that strengthen the security posture of AKS.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, OR Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

• 4+ year(s) experience with Kubernetes, Go programming language (Golang), and cloud-native technologies.

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:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
  • OR related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, OR Python
  • OR Master'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.

• 6+ year(s) experience with Kubernetes, Go programming language (Golang), and cloud-native technologies.

• 4+ year(s) experience building and operating cloud-based and distributed systems, with a strong understanding of scalability, reliability, authentication, and authorization in production environments.

• 1+ year(s) experience working with artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic technologies, such as large language models (LLMs), autonomous agents, or AI-assisted development tools including GitHub Copilot, security analyzers, and anomaly detection systems.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 17th, 2025.

• Design and implement secure, scalable components and libraries for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), contributing to cloud-native infrastructure that supports a wide range of workloads.
• Collaborate with security and engineering teams to identify and address cross-cutting security concerns across the AKS stack.
• Develop and integrate artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools to support threat modeling, code analysis, and incident response.
• Contribute to automation and tooling that improves the quality of security signals and enhances developer productivity.
• Participate in design reviews and help shape secure-by-default architecture decisions.
• Stay current with emerging trends in security, AI technologies, and developments in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

As the Principal Software Engineer on our team, you would have the opportunity to work on:

• ONNX: an open standard format for representing AI models, enabling AI developers to work on AI models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes, and compilers.
• ONNX Runtime: ONNX based cross-platform, high performance ML inferencing and training accelerator.
• Foundry Local: an on-device AI inference solution offering performance, privacy, customization, and cost advantages. It integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows and applications through an intuitive CLI, SDK, and REST API.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year.

Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

As a Principal Software Engineer on the team the common tasks of the job would include, but not be limited to

• Partnering with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for one or more complex scenarios.
• Providing technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Leading by example and mentoring others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company.
• Leveraging deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Holding accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seeking new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.
• Embodying our

As a Senior Software Engineer for Azure Compute, you will work on mission-critical systems that require a deep understanding of distributed computing, cloud infrastructure, and system reliability. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement features that improve scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency. Your contributions will directly impact the experience of customers running large-scale workloads on Azure.

This role offers the opportunity to work in a fast-paced and collaborative environment where innovation and continuous improvement are encouraged. You will help shape the future of Azure’s compute platform by influencing architectural decisions and contributing to the evolution of cloud-native infrastructure.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, OR Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

• 1+ year(s) of experience in incident management, debugging large-scale distributed systems, and collaborating across teams to align on complex technical issues.

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:

• Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 1+ year(s) of experience with Microsoft Azure Software Development Kits (SDKs) and Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), along with a deep understanding of compute orchestration, asynchronous operations, and service reliability.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 17th, 2025.

• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a set of scenarios.
• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
• Leads by example and mentor others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products.
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive multiple group's project plans, release plans, and work items.
• Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
• Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in C++, C, C#, or Java
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years industry experience coding in C++.
• Proficiency in debugging complex multithreaded scenarios.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C++, C, C#, or Java
  • OR Master'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#, or Java
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Familiarity with network topologies and protocols and Windows Internals / Windows OS concepts.
• Familiar with modern C++ concepts and Standard Template Library (STL).
• Familiarity with cloud services.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until September 3, 2025.

• Develop and maintain protocol and transport stacks for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) across multiple operating system architectures, with a primary focus on Windows.
• Instrument and optimize code to enhance performance and diagnosability.
  Innovate and implement new features to improve connection reliability and user experience in RDP.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design a common transport framework and implement proactive alerting and testing to prevent regressions.
• Analyze customer feedback, incident data, and telemetry to identify areas for improvement.
• Mentor and support other developers by sharing best practices and technical guidance across the organization.

and take their careers. This is a world of, more innovation, more openness, and the skya cloud-enabled world.

Within Azure Data, the messaging and real-time analytics team provides comprehensive solutions and a robust platform that enables users to ingest high granularity signals (real-time & observability) and complex data, converting those into a competitive advantage in real-time for both end users and modern applications.

Azure Messaging – we work on thecutting edgetradeoffs –We build Azure Service Bus (http://aka.ms/servicebus) which is part of Azure Messaging.Azure Service Bus asynchronous messaging patterns are the architectural cornerstone of reliable,applications. Integration of various cloud resources with Azure Service Bus messaging ensures smooth operation under heavy and variablewith the durability to survive intermittent failures.play a key role in driving innovations that enable 10x throughput and power mission-critical workloads at massive scale.and have fun.

better served

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Scienceor related technical field AND 5+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of software design, development, and architecture experience.
• 4+ years of building commercial grade, robust and scalable solutions in C, C++, C# or any other object-oriented programming.

Other Requirements

to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirementsrequired for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check:

• This position willbe requiredto pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred/Additional Qualifications

• ​Experience developing Cloud online services or extensive experience using cloud online services.
• Experience working with messaging technologies, including open-source technologies like: Active MQ, RabbitMQ, etc.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:Microsoft will accept applications for the role until September 05, 2025.

• Build real-time data ingestion services whichsupportmillions of messagesbeing processedper second with 99.999% service availability.
• Buildhighly reliabledistributed storage systems which support low latency/high throughput for ingestion relying oncutting edgetechnologies like Azure Service Fabric, Virtual Machine Scale Sets etc.
• Support hundreds of thousands of Azure applications where the Azure Service Bus is the backbone for core features.
• Integrate with ecosystems such as: IoT applications, Azure Functions, Logic Apps etc.- Deliver Azure Service Bus to Azure cloud as well as hybrid environments.

Embody our