The Principal Software Engineer role at Microsoft AI Experiences focuses on designing and building solutions for the advertising platform that supports millions of campaigns. This position involves working across the entire stack, from backend services to APIs and applications. The team is modernizing the platform by incorporating cloud-native services and AI capabilities. The ideal candidate will lead high-impact features and improve system performance while mentoring other engineers.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements.

• Design, build and operate scalable backend services and APIs that power campaign management, reporting and optimization workflows.
• Own features end to end across the stack, including data models, storage, service logic, API contracts and the client applications that consume them.
• Design distributed systems for high throughput, low latency, fault tolerance and cost efficiency on cloud infrastructure.
• Drive improvements in reliability, performance, security, observability and maintainability across services and applications.
• Lead technical design, architecture reviews and investigations for business-critical features.
• Own production health for your areas, including monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, incident response and post-incident improvements.
• Partner with product, design and partner engineering teams to turn complex advertiser needs into well-built, end-to-end solutions.
• Advance AI-enabled engineering practices, and help integrate AI capabilities into platform services and advertiser workflows.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through code reviews, design guidance and knowledge sharing.
• Identify opportunities to modernize legacy systems, reduce complexity and improve customer outcomes.

• 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.