Software Engineering IC5
Role Overview
The Microsoft Frontier Company Engineering team uses a Forward Deployed Engineering model, embedding with customer teams to solve complex problems and deliver production-ready solutions.
The Principal Software Engineer builds reliable systems and services for government, defense, and intelligence customers, collaborating with data scientists, product managers, and domain experts.
The team applies AI and software engineering tools across the development lifecycle, with a focus on 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 problems and deliver production-ready solutions.
The Principal Software Engineer builds reliable systems and services for government, defense, and intelligence customers, collaborating with data scientists, product managers, and domain experts.
The team applies AI and software engineering tools across the development lifecycle, with a focus on security, quality, and trust.
Requirements, design, and architecture
- Partner with stakeholders to determine user requirements, incorporate feedback, and measure customer value and usage.
- Lead solution architecture, design proposals, investigation, and testing of hypotheses; own design decisions and guide other team members.
- Plan solution testing, improve test coverage and automation, and ensure architecture meets security and compliance expectations.
- Identify product and service dependencies, coordinate across teams, and address downstream effects on security, performance, and reliability.
Coding and implementation
- Lead development of extensible, maintainable code and improve performance through optimization, debugging, refactoring, and reuse.
- Review code for quality, reliability, accuracy, diagnosability, maintainability, and adherence to coding practices.
- Guide project plans, releases, estimates, milestones, and roadmaps; escalate issues that could cause major delays.
- Run experiments and prototypes, evaluate results, identify customer-value metrics, and determine next steps or release decisions.
- Implement and deploy solutions safely within existing frameworks, accounting for impacts on users and connected services.
Reliability and engineering excellence
- Support live services on a rotational on-call basis, mitigate complex issues, write postmortems, and restore service within SLA timeframes.
- Serve as a designated responsible individual, monitor service health, coordinate coverage, create playbooks, reduce incidents, and escalate issues.
- Integrate telemetry and instrumentation, analyze system metrics, and create outputs such as notifications and dashboards.
- Improve developer tools and automation; develop standardized, repeatable solutions and promote security, privacy, safety, accessibility, and compliance.
- Stay current with technical developments, share engineering practices, mentor others, and coordinate with partners across Microsoft.
Required qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
Preferred qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field and 10+ years of technical engineering experience coding in the listed or similar languages, or equivalent experience.
- Master’s degree in computer science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in the listed or similar languages, or equivalent experience.
Application information
- Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled; the posting states a minimum opening period of 5 days.
About Microsoft
Microsoft describes its mission as empowering people and organizations and emphasizes growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, and accountability.
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