Software Engineer AI Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Washington

Overview

Project Sophia is a new generation business application, built ground up from market-disruptive, AI-first product principles. The product has been designed to completely re-define how complex, cross domain business problems are solved. Every interaction, every component and every user experience has been designed leveraging the full power and potential of generative AI and is taking the notion of AI based experiences way beyond the standard AI chat experiences.

Multi-modal concepts, combined with an emphasis of visual appeal and ease of use, is empowering any business user to interact with an infinite, AI Powered Business Research canvas where users can explore and resolve any business question both within and across business domains. Powered by large language models and deep business domain expertise, Project Sophia will empower the user to build out research journeys, automatically suggesting relevant data sources and correlating insights, intelligently visualizing exploration outcomes and suggesting next actions in the research journey. Project Sophia represents the new way of doing business, enabling strategic business decision making in a fraction of the time – filling a gap in the market where no app exists today.

As we advance our product journey, we are innovating and iterating at a rapid pace. To further accelerate our momentum by bringing agentic, AI-powered experiences to the business application space and transforming how people work we continue to expand our investments in generative AI capabilities.

The Team

We are a small, but very dynamic and passionate team that fully embraces the build-measure-learn iterative development approach. We work towards the common goal of building a product customers love. As a natural part of our product design and development process we are working very closely with customers as well as listening to telemetry and other key signals which allow us to consistently evolve based on customer demand and adoption patterns. Deep collaboration across PM, Design, Engineering, and Science is a given and all disciplines play important roles as part of the product development process.

In Sophia’s user experience team, we are committed to building the best-in-class AI experiences to gain insight into strategic business questions. We foster a culture of diversity, collaboration, and innovation, valuing everyone's unique perspectives and contributions. Our agile, start-up-like environment encourages out-of-the-box thinking and empowers each team member to contribute towards our shared mission of delivering a highly innovative, agentic, AI powered user experience that is positioned to fundamentally change what business applications look like in the future.

The Candidate Profile & Role

As a Principal Software Engineer - AI on the team, you will bring deep software engineering and AI expertise to architect, design, and deliver intelligent solutions and end-to-end experiences for Sophia. You’ll collaborate with business and technology leaders, internal users, and partners to shape technical direction and build scalable, production-ready systems that leverage AI to solve complex business requests.

In this role, you are expected to lead across software engineering fundamentals—architecture, coding, testing, and deployment—while pioneering AI-centric UI and delivering differentiated, AI-native experiences that set Sophia apart in the market.

We are seeking individuals who are customer-focused, passionate, creative, and collaborative, with a proven track record of delivering impactful and delightful experiences at scale. If you are motivated by our mission to innovate in AI-driven UI and define novel interaction paradigms, we encourage you to apply.

Joining Project Sophia offers a unique opportunity to work on something highly strategic to Microsoft and be at the cutting edge of innovation. We provide opportunities for technical leadership, mentorship, and career growth within a dynamic and fast-paced environment.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer - AI with applied AI focus, you will apply both software engineering and AI expertise to build intelligent, scalable solutions. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact features aligned with enterprise standards and cloud-scale requirements. Your responsibilities include:

• Design, implement, and ship AI-first product capabilities end-to-end from rapid prototype to production, spanning LLM-powered services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and intelligent UX experiences that delight users through Sophia’s AI canvas.
• Shape and evolve full-stack architecture, integrating front-end experiences, back-end services, and AI orchestration layers that connect models, context, and tools to deliver cohesive, extensible, high-performance systems.
• Collaborate with design, research, and platform teams to adapt or fine-tune LLMs/SLMs and multimodal models for real-world customer scenarios, ensuring outcomes are contextual, transparent, and human-centered.
• Build agentic, tool-using, and multimodal workflows that reason across data and services; optimize for safety, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Drive engineering excellence, including secure-by-design principles, accessibility compliance, automated testing, and high-quality code craftsmanship across the product lifecycle.
• Define and apply evaluation frameworks for AI systems, using telemetry, experimentation, and continuous feedback loops to improve reasoning quality and user experience.
• Drive live-site reliability and operational excellence, participating in On-Call rotations while maintaining a sustainable, high-ownership engineering culture.

Qualifications Required 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.

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:

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent or relevant industry experience.
• 8+ years of experience with modern web technologies such as .NET / Node / React / Angular, building RESTful APIs.
• Solid experience in an OO language such as C#, Java, or Python.
• Experience working with generative AI, large language models, or agent-based systems in production scenarios.
• Proven track record of designing and delivering complex, scalable systems.
• Excellence in one or more general programming languages including but not limited to: Python, C#; JavaScript; TypeScript.
• Comfortable driving complex server & client architecture across large product teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM evaluation techniques, including LLM-as-a-Judge, agentic evaluations, and RAG assessments.
• A track record of delivering successful, large-scale applied ML projects in an industry setting.
• Experience with MLOps practices, including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring, and CI/CD for machine learning.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Skilled in building and operating infrastructure using Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and deploying containerized models with Docker, Kubernetes, or similar tools.
• Solid coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills, with a focus on system-level thinking.

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.