Principal Software Engineer - FDE
Role Overview
The Microsoft Frontier Company Engineering team uses a Forward Deployed Engineering model, embedding with customer teams to solve complex challenges and deliver production-ready solutions.
The Principal Software Engineer works with data scientists, product managers, and domain experts to build reliable systems for government, defense, and intelligence customers.
The team applies AI and software engineering across the development lifecycle while emphasizing security, quality, and trust.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Role overview
The Microsoft Frontier Company Engineering team uses a Forward Deployed Engineering model, embedding with customer teams to solve complex challenges and deliver production-ready solutions.
The Principal Software Engineer works with data scientists, product managers, and domain experts to build reliable systems for government, defense, and intelligence customers.
The team applies AI and software engineering across the development lifecycle while emphasizing security, quality, and trust.
Engineering and delivery
- Understand user needs and use customer feedback and value measures to guide designs and fixes.
- Lead architecture, design documentation, testing strategy, dependency management, and security and compliance considerations.
- Develop, optimize, debug, refactor, and review maintainable code; improve coding standards and test automation.
- Plan project and release milestones, run experiments, and lead implementation and safe deployment.
- Provide on-call live-service support, resolve incidents, maintain response playbooks, and document postmortems.
- Use telemetry and data analysis to improve service performance, reliability, availability, and product decisions.
- Improve developer tools, deployment automation, scalable quality practices, and security, privacy, safety, and accessibility.
- Share engineering practices and coordinate with partner teams and stakeholders.
Required qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and at least 6 years of technical engineering experience coding, or equivalent experience.
- Coding languages may include C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; the list is illustrative, not a requirement to know every language.
Preferred qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field and at least 10 years of technical engineering coding experience, or a relevant master's degree and at least 8 years; equivalent experience is accepted.
Application timing
- Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled; the posting states a minimum opening period of 5 days.
Company values
Microsoft describes its mission as empowering people and organizations and emphasizes growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, and accountability.
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