[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer - AI Frameworks @Microsoft

Role Description

The Microsoft AI Frameworks team develops the software and performance systems that enable state-of-the-art AI models to run reliably and efficiently at cloud scale. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who can establish direction and lead teams through ambiguous, end-to-end systems challenges.

• Serve as a technical lead for high-impact initiatives spanning AI frameworks and the serving stack for frontier models, including OpenAI GPT models.
• Establish technical direction, make consequential architectural decisions, and lead engineers across teams through the design and delivery of optimizations for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and Microsoft silicon.
• Identify systemic opportunities, align stakeholders around durable architectures and success measures, and remain hands-on in critical areas of implementation.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities.
• Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding stakeholders accountable to clear decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Build technical leadership capacity across the organization by mentoring engineers, developing emerging technical leads, and creating an inclusive engineering culture.
• Steer ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting the engineering approach, delegating and unblocking critical work, and directly contributing through prototypes and implementation.
• Spearhead common measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities.
• Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency.
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.

Qualifications

• Required Qualifications:
  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C++ or Python, OR equivalent experience.
• Other Requirements:
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements.
• Preferred Qualifications:
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C++ or Python, OR
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C++ or Python, OR equivalent experience.
  • Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead for complex cross-team initiatives.
  • Robust/extensive experience designing and shipping complex, high-performance or distributed software systems.
  • Deep foundation in software architecture, computer architecture, and accelerator-aware optimization.
  • Advanced experience with LLM inference frameworks or AI accelerator kernel optimizations.
  • Proven track record of creating reusable platforms and influencing senior technical and business stakeholders.

Benefits

• The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year.
• In specific locations, such as the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, the base pay range is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.
• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.