As a Principal Software Engineer within Microsoft Foundry, Core AI, you will play a critical role in building and evolving the platform that enables developers and enterprises to design, deploy, and scale intelligent agents and generative AI systems. You will drive technical direction across the full software development lifecycle, owning architectural decisions for complex, large-scale systems that integrate cutting-edge AI technologies while meeting the highest standards of quality, reliability, security, and compliance. In this role, you will anticipate and deeply understand customer and developer needs in complex scenarios, translating them into durable platform capabilities and delightful experiences. You will provide technical leadership across teams, guiding design tradeoffs, identifying systemic challenges, and delivering solutions that create long-term impact while accelerating value to customers. As a senior technical voice, you will mentor engineers, influence without authority, and raise the engineering bar through strong design principles, rigorous code reviews, and a culture of continuous learning. You will collaborate closely with partner teams across Core AI and Azure to ensure seamless integration, scalable architectures, and robust deployment and testing frameworks. You will champion automation, operational excellence, and secure-by-design practices, helping define how AI systems and agent platforms are built responsibly and at scale—ultimately shaping how the world interacts with intelligent systems.

Drives the improvement of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Proactively takes responsibility for the content of their AI-generated requirements, design documents, code, and other assets, assisting the rest of the team to do the same. Incorporates Responsible AI practices into the SDLC to ensure appropriate controls over AI-generated assets. Intentionally applies SDLC and engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE framework, Engineering System Success Playbook [ESSP]) to guide improvements to processes and practices, especially those involving AI. Experiments with AI tools and practices to improve their own capabilities, and provides recommendations on how to adopt them to the rest of the team.

Provides technical leadership during code reviews for a solution/product area to assure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Brings expertise to code reviews to help improve code quality, proactively coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills. Ensures coding standards are followed. Screens for and establishes best practices in reviews and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process. Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across the company that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while accounting for and incorporating relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Leads efforts to identify and anticipate blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalate them, and communicate how they will impact timelines, and then drives the identification and implementation of strategies and/or opportunities to address them. Acts as an expert on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions through while developing code before issues occur across products and teams in production. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations. Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, and owns the implementation of repair actions and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence. Drives applying least-access principles, using logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and champions those practices across the team.

Establishes best practices and mentors others to create a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code. Establishes best practices and mentors others on ensuring test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Provides technical leadership on adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite across a solution or product. Mentors others on, and builds testable code and considers testability during design across solutions and/or products. Acts as a thought leader for understanding different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintaining up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applies them across the architecture as appropriate. Designs and executes plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code across solutions and/or products. Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation. Oversees, influences, and owns efforts and design discussions for the overall system architecture of entire products/solutions that are deeply complex and often ambiguous. Owns the testing and exploration of various design options for entire products/solutions, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Owns creating proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and deeply complex proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Proactively identifies and evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines and advocates for how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Provides technical leadership to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through deeply complex data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Reviews deeply complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements. Provides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and incorporating them into the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. Leads the active identification of other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Helps to create relationships and links impacting upstream and downstream interactions between systems and ensures security, compliance, performance, and reliability can be achieved across the entire stack. Drives coordination and collaboration with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap. Enables and fosters communications and proactively negotiates across teams to resolve conflicts around dependency ownership and required work. Drives agreements between dependent teams to align to the delivery schedule.

Leads the identification of requirements for, and the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across complex products, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across complex products. Applies and helps to create best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises, and holds accountability for product/solution areas that do not meet expectations. Provides technical leadership through efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams. Leads in developing and assures the presence of visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for products. Develops and maintains a deep understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. Provides thought leadership and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to en