Microsoft Principal Software Engineer 

Taiwan, Taoyuan City 

753474086

We research and develop algorithms, tools and high-performance libraries to build state-of-the-art AI-based information retrieval in Azure Data products. For example, we build market-leading vector search in multiple data products, for which innovate both on the research and engineering (e.g., see the DiskANN project). We also work on semantic search more broadly.

Required/minimum 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.
• 2+ years of experience in development of database internals OR contributions to open-source table and file formats, query engines or related libraries (e.g., Iceberg, Spark, Polars)

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

• 2+ years of experience in high-performance programming in Rust or C++
• 2+ years of experience in development and deployments of embeddings, rankers and other retrieval models and pipelines.

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 16th, 2025.

• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform. Leads identification of other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's own system may provide support to others. Leads efforts to determine back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product. Demonstrates deep understanding of up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, driving reliability in the solutions, and optimize dependency chains and retrieves across teams. Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. Enables cross team communications and resolves conflicts between teams.
• Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across products. Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices.
• Considers and leads the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products. Defines and develops standardized, repeatable, scalable solutions to guarantee quality.
• 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. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates any issue that would cause a major delay.
• Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft's quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area. Applies feedback to current and future iterations. Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews, and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices.

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