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Job Details
Posted date: Oct 05, 2026
There have been 3209 jobs posted with the title of Principal Software Engineer all time at Microsoft.There have been 3209 Principal Software Engineer jobs posted in the last month.
Category: Software Engineering
Location: Redmond, WA
Estimated salary: $248,400
Range: $165,600 - $331,200
Employment type: Full-Time
Work location type: 3 days / week in-office
Role: Individual Contributor
Description
OverviewOverview
The Commerce Financial Platform organization builds intelligent, scalable services & experiences that power Microsoft’s commerce needs end‑to‑end. We’re accelerating a new era of AI‑driven business applications—grounded in data, built for collaboration, and designed to simplify complex workflows across CRM/ERP scenarios. Join us if you're passionate about redefining how people engage with AI at enterprise scale, optimizing processes, and building innovative products that make a difference.
Responsibilities
What you’ll do
Design and ship AI systems end‑to‑end—from exploration to production—spanning LLM‑based services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and robust evaluation/observability.
Build agentic and tool‑using workflows that reason across data and services, optimizing for safety, latency, and cost at cloud scale (Azure preferred).
Collaborate across research and product teams to adapt/fine‑tune models (LLMs/SLMs, multimodal) for real customer scenarios.
Lead technical direction across features and services; mentor engineers; champion high engineering standards, reliability, and accessible, inclusive experiences.
Uphold Responsible AI, secure and compliance practices in design, data handling, and experimentation.
Participate in on‑call/operational excellence as part of a healthy, sustainable engineering culture; lead by example.
Qualifications
Minimum qualifications
8+ years building and shipping production software/services including 3+ years with modern ML (e.g., transformer‑based LLMs) and applied AI/ML systems.
Coding skills in one or more: Python, C#, or C++—with design/architecture experience for cloud services (Azure preferred).
Hands‑on experience taking LLM/ML features from prototype to production (evaluation, safety, telemetry, and iterative improvement).
Ability to influence across teams and drive ambiguous, multi‑partner initiatives to outcomes.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science/engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check (on hire/transfer and periodically thereafter).
Preferred qualifications
Experience with agentic systems, model/tool orchestration, and/or retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG).
Expertise with Azure AI, vector stores, prompt/response evaluation, and performance optimization for LLM workloads.
Track record of shipping applied research to production and partnering with research teams on custom/fine‑tuned models.
Familiarity with Responsible AI practices and inclusive design/accessibility standards.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and identities to apply. (Standard legal/EEO and accommodations statements will be appended by the careers site template.)
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Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.