Software Engineering IC5

Overview

Microsoft Commerce powers the business engine behind Microsoft’s global ecosystem, enabling the monetization of products and services that reach hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Every Azure workload, Microsoft 365 subscription, Copilot seat, marketplace transaction, consumption-based service, enterprise agreement, and emerging AI offering relies on Commerce platforms operating at massive scale.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will work at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, distributed systems, large-scale commerce platforms, and business transformation. You will help define the next generation of intelligent commerce capabilities that enable Microsoft to innovate faster, launch new business models, support AI-native products, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Commerce sits at the center of Microsoft's future growth strategy, supporting increasingly complex monetization models, AI-powered offerings, consumption-based experiences, ecosystem partnerships, and global compliance requirements. This platform is central to Microsoft's ability to commercialize innovation at worldwide scale.

You will have a unique opportunity to shape how AI transforms Commerce, helping Microsoft evolve into an AI-first enterprise where intelligent systems, agents, automation, and human expertise work together to accelerate innovation and deliver measurable business value.

Responsibilities

What You'll Do

Architect and Build Next-Generation Commerce Platforms

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of highly scalable, secure, and resilient distributed systems.
• Drive technical strategy across multiple services, domains, and engineering teams.
• Design cloud-native solutions capable of handling mission-critical workloads at Microsoft scale.
• Solve complex cross-organizational engineering challenges involving performance, scale, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Define long-term platform evolution strategies aligned with business and product goals.

Drive AI-Native Engineering

• Build intelligent systems leveraging Generative AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, RAG architectures, vector databases, orchestration frameworks, and AI agents.
• Define patterns for AI-powered product experiences and engineering productivity.
• Establish evaluation frameworks, quality gates, observability, and governance for AI-driven systems.
• Apply Responsible AI principles throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Design architectures where humans and AI collaborate effectively to improve productivity, quality, and innovation.

Own End-to-End Engineering Excellence

• Drive engineering quality across architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations.
• Establish strong standards around reliability, performance, maintainability, security, and usability.
• Champion automated testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and operational readiness.
• Lead root cause investigations and drive systemic fixes for production issues.
• Ensure systems meet Microsoft requirements for privacy, compliance, availability, and security.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as a recognized technical leader across teams and organizations.
• Influence architecture and design decisions beyond immediate team boundaries.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers.
• Drive technical reviews, architecture boards, and engineering excellence initiatives.
• Act as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders, product leaders, and business stakeholders.

Qualifications

Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale production systems.
• Experience serving as technical lead or architecture owner for complex enterprise-scale platforms.
• Proven track record of delivering business-critical systems that operate reliably at scale.

Technical Expertise

Software Engineering

• Expert-level proficiency in one or more languages such as C#, Java, Python, Go, or C++.
• Strong understanding of software design patterns, architecture principles, and engineering best practices.
• Deep expertise in API design, microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.

Cloud Platforms

• Extensive experience building solutions on Azure.
• Strong knowledge of cloud-native services, containers, Kubernetes, service meshes, and modern platform technologies.
• Expertise in resiliency engineering, observability, and reliability engineering.

Data Platforms

• Strong understanding of relational and NoSQL systems.
• Experience with SQL performance optimization, large-scale data processing, streaming platforms, and analytics systems.
• Experience designing high-performance transactional systems.

Full-Stack Engineering

• Demonstrated ability to work across the entire technology stack.
• Experience building modern web applications and services.
• Knowledge of frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, or equivalent.
• Strong backend, API, platform, and data engineering skills.

Artificial Intelligence

The ideal candidate should possess deep technical understanding of:

• Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Agentic AI systems
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• Prompt engineering
• AI observability and evaluation frameworks
• AI safety and governance
• AI orchestration platforms
• Vector search technologies
• AI-assisted software development workflows
• Human-in-the-loop AI architectures

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or related discipline.
• Experience building AI-first products in production environments.
• Experience in commerce, billing, marketplaces, subscriptions, consumption-based platforms, pricing systems, or financial systems.
• Contributions to significant open-source initiatives.
• Publications, patents, or recognized technical thought leadership.
• Experience working across geographically distributed engineering teams.

What Makes You Successful

You are:

• A systems thinker who sees connections across products, platforms, customers, and business strategy.
• Passionate about engineering quality and operational excellence.
• Obsessed with customer impact.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and defining direction.
• Able to influence without authority across organizational boundaries.
• Continuously learning and adopting emerging technologies.
• Excited by the opportunity to use AI as a force multiplier for innovation and engineering effectiveness.

Impact You'll Have

In this role, you will help define how Microsoft commercializes the next generation of products and AI-powered services. You will influence systems that support billions of dollars in business, power global customer experiences, and enable entirely new business models.

You will help build the intelligent commerce platform that enables Microsoft's AI transformation journey, driving innovation across pricing, monetization, fulfillment, business planning, analytics, and customer engagement. Working at the intersection of Commerce and AI provides a rare opportunity to shape the future of one of Microsoft's most critical strategic platforms and contribute directly to the company's long-term growth and transformation.

Microsoft Culture

We embrace a growth mindset, foster innovation, prioritize inclusion, and empower every engineer to have outsized impact. We are looking for exceptional technical leaders who are passionate about solving hard problems, raising the engineering bar, and helping define the future of AI-powered commerce.

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.