Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering
Microsoft· Software· Sep 3, 2026 · 2mo ago
United States, Washington, Redmond
In office
Full-time
Principal
$168K–$230K est.
6+ years exp
Job description
Overview
Come build, from scratch, the AI-first developer platform that lets thousands of engineers ship faster and safer.
We're a new Platform Engineering team building an internal developer platform, golden paths, and the developer experience for the Microsoft engineering teams behind the world's largest and most complex commerce platforms. Empower the teams that build the copilots and agents that tens of thousands of sellers, partners, and support people rely on around the world every day — global scale and reach with unbounded opportunity to make meaningful impact. The mandate is real, and the appetite is there, from leaders and teams: take the KTLO and toil out of engineers' days, make safe deployment the easy path, and make agent-driven workflows the default for how we build.
We run the platform as a product — teams pick it up because it's useful, not because they're told to. What's open is the technical frontier: agents change what a platform can even do. A platform used to be bounded by what you could deterministically wire across systems, with the gaps left to people to glue by hand. Now agents can carry that ambiguous, cross-system work, and building greenfield, we get to work out how much more a platform can take on.
If you'd rather ship and learn than ask permission, and you're as curious about what teams and work become in this shift as you are about the tech itself, this is the rare seat where you get to define the thing, not just run it.
Why this role
• You'll make thousands of engineers faster. You build the golden paths, templates, and shared foundation (identity, secrets, observability, safe deployment) so every team gets them by default instead of wiring them up each time. It's a 0→1 build, not maintenance.
• Agents do the wiring; you make the calls. One agent stands up a fully-wired service the moment a repo is created, and other tooling migrates existing services onto the foundation for you. You direct the agents and the codegen, and the architecture is yours.
• You own a real piece of it. Take a capability area that several teams use — the service-creation agent, the migration tooling, or the per-PR test environments — and see it through in production, including getting those teams onto it.
Responsibilities
• Work with platform and product teams to turn developer pain points into golden paths, templates, and shared capabilities they'll adopt.
• Lead the design of a capability area or agent workstream that several teams depend on: the dependencies, the interfaces, the design docs, and maintainable code others build on.
• Build and operate the agent and codegen tooling that wires new and existing services onto the foundation (identity, secrets, observability, safe deployment) by default.
• Own what you ship in production, including on-call. Watch for regressions, config drift, and integration failures, and fix them.
• Keep raising availability, reliability, observability, and performance, and bring what you learn back to the team.
• Mentor other engineers and hold the "platform as a product" bar.
What we're looking for
• Strong engineering fundamentals, with production systems you've built and run at scale.
• AI-native. You've shipped real production software built with generative AI and agents (not just demos), and you have the judgment to direct them.
• Depth in one of identity, secrets and config, observability, or CI/CD and safe deployment, plus working knowledge of the others.
• Cloud-native experience (Azure a plus) and fluency in one or more of C#/.NET, TypeScript, or Python.
• A bias for action and comfort owning things end to end when the path isn't defined yet.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum qualifications
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python — OR equivalent experience.
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.
Additional or preferred qualifications
• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience, OR Bachelor's Degree AND 10+ years — OR equivalent experience.
• Deep experience in one or more of identity, secrets/config, observability, or CI/CD and safe deployment.
• Azure and modern .NET, or comparable cloud-native stacks.
• Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build production software.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, paved roads, CI/CD systems, or cloud infrastructure at scale.
#EEOPE
Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
careers.microsoft.com
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
Application prep
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Keywords to mirror
aici/cdazuretypescriptpythonjavajavascript
- Platform
- eightfold
- Effort
- medium