Principal Software Engineer - AI Frameworks

Microsoft's AI Frameworks team develops software, performance systems, and engineering tools that enable state-of-the-art AI models to run reliably and efficiently at cloud scale. The Principal Software Engineer will provide hands-on technical leadership for high-impact initiatives spanning AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling, while establishing technical direction and leading cross-team execution.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities
• Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners accountable to clear decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes
• Build technical leadership capacity across the organization by mentoring engineers, developing emerging technical leads, establishing high standards for quality and maintainability, and creating an inclusive engineering culture in which teams can execute effectively at scale
• Steer ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon; set technical priorities, resolve trade-offs, and drive teams to decisions
• Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting the engineering approach, delegating and unblocking critical work, and directly contributing through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness
• Spearhead common measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities
• Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency
• Identify, innovate and productize new modeling and optimization opportunities for frontier AI models
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++ or Python,
  • OR equivalent experience
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check
• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C++ or Python
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C++ or Python
• equivalent experience
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead for complex cross-team initiatives, including setting strategy, making architectural decisions, aligning stakeholders, and driving execution from concept through production
• Robust/extensive experience designing and shipping complex, high-performance or distributed software systems
• Deep foundation in software architecture, computer architecture, and accelerator-aware optimization
• Advanced experience with AI/ML workloads and frameworks
• Proven track record of creating reusable platforms, influencing senior technical and business stakeholders, developing other technical leaders, and scaling engineering practices across teams