The Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Microsoft Substrate will lead the technical and operational direction for reliability across Substrate workloads. This role involves influencing architecture, reliability strategy, and engineering practices across teams and organizations. The engineer will mentor others and represent SRE perspectives with senior leadership. The position requires a focus on high availability, reliability, and security for critical services in regulated environments.

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience OR equivalent experience.
• Candidates must meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements for this role.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a favorably adjudicated Tier 3 (T3) background investigation for access to GCCH and DoD environments.
• Ability to meet Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) eligibility requirements for access to GCCM environments.

• Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices across Substrate workloads in highly regulated environments.
• Serve as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer, participating in on-call rotations and leading incident response for Substrate services.
• Provide hands-on leadership during complex or high-impact incidents, setting technical direction and response strategy.
• Drive high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable, systemic engineering improvements across teams.
• Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions.
• Drive architectural decisions and define software engineering standards that make reliability, security, and compliance intrinsic to Substrate services.
• Influence service design and engineering decisions across organizational boundaries.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers and shape the long-term technical direction of the SRE discipline.
• Represent Substrate SRE perspectives with senior leadership and cross-functional partners.

• Employees at Microsoft are often offered comprehensive, “world-class” benefits—including health and mental-wellness programs, competitive pay with bonuses and stock awards, and retirement/savings options. Time-off and flexibility are common, with generous vacation and holidays, parental and caregiver leave, and flexible work schedules, alongside learning support, employee resource groups, product discounts, and matching-gifts/volunteering programs. Specific benefits can vary by region.