Principal Software Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Washington

Overview

Within AI Platform, the Azure AI Search team powers rich knowledge base experiences for apps of all kinds. We integrate the best of Microsoft AI for content understanding, search relevance, and knowledge sources.

As a Principal Software Engineering, you will shape end-to-end customer and developer experiences for Azure AI Search—ensuring customers can discover, adopt, and succeed with AI capabilities at global scale. You will operate where product experience meets cloud services, setting direction that improves reliability, security, and time-to-value.

You will be a technical leader that fosters a high-performing team to discover, define, and deliver new product capabilities—often turning ambiguous customer needs into clear, shippable features and reliable components. You will be a trusted leader where engineers collaborate, move quickly, and continuously raise the bar in a demanding and exciting space. You will also apply evolving AI tools and AI-assisted engineering practices to design, implement, test, and ship AI features faster and more safely across UX flows, portal experiences, samples, SDKs, and APIs.

You will thrive in a highly dynamic environment by staying close to users—listening, learning, and translating feedback into product and experience improvements. You will own key entry points and integration experiences (including partner integrations) so customers can onboard smoothly, extend the product confidently, and realize value quickly.

You will set technical direction and drive operational excellence from design through production—building for security, reliability, and observability, and ensuring features can be operated with confidence at scale. You’ll establish strong engineering systems (quality, incident readiness, and release practices) and use data from real-world usage to continuously refine the product and developer experience.

Success in this role is measured by outcomes customers feel: simpler onboarding, clearer and more consistent experiences across every surface area, and secure, reliable features that run smoothly in production—enabling faster adoption of new AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Leads the disciplined adoption and continuous improvement of AI tools and Responsible AI practices across the SDLC, ensuring accountability for AI-generated assets and using engineering health metrics to drive measurable process improvements and share learnings.
• Leads engineering excellence for production services by driving diagnosability and incident prevention (debugging, telemetry, retrospectives), strengthening secure and privacy-preserving operations (least privilege), and raising code quality through timely, high-impact results, automated analysis, and best practices (including GenAI) to deliver secure, maintainable, high-performing code while proactively managing blockers and risks.
• Deliver success through empowerment and accountability by consistently demonstrating, sharing, and championing technical values.
• Uphold team culture, embody organizational values, and practice core engineering principles in daily work.
• Clarify technical objectives and outcomes, foster collaboration across boundaries, and help the team adapt and learn through example and leadership.
• Leads cross-group planning and execution (project/release/work management) by breaking long-term vision and ambiguous problems into milestones, driving estimation and capacity planning, and ensuring secure, compliant delivery with operational readiness (flighting, rollback, and disaster recovery).
• Partners with internal and external stakeholders to validate user requirements and feasibility, incorporates customer insights and success metrics (including accessibility/globalization), and advocates for customer security and privacy needs across the solution.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years of technical engineering experience building and operating cloud services (or equivalent experience).
• 4+ years of technical leadership and architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI-powered product capabilities and/or search, retrieval, or data/knowledge services at scale.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages.
• Experience owning end-to-end customer and developer experiences across one or more product surfaces including defining requirements and driving delivery.
• Experience with distributed systems and production operations (reliability, incident response, observability/telemetry, and safe release practices).
• Experience designing and delivering secure services, including identity/access patterns and privacy/compliance considerations.
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted engineering tools to improve SDLC quality and velocity, including responsible use of AI-generated assets.
• Strong customer empathy with a track record of using qualitative and quantitative feedback to iterate product experiences.
• Highly effective at creating significant impact within intricate codebases and large organizations.

Compensation

• The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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:

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.