About the job
Generative AI is transforming how products are designed, built, measured, and operated at Microsoft 365 scale. Office Product Group aims to enable every engineer, product manager, designer, and data scientist to turn their best ideas into customer value through AI and agentic systems with significantly less friction and toil. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer and technical thought leader who will partner closely with product management and research to help define this transformation and drive adoption across our product development organization.
Responsibilities
Own and deliver complete features across the development lifecycle, including design, architecture, implementation, testability, debugging, shipping, and servicing.\\\nUse AI-assisted development practices in your daily engineering work, continuously evaluate emerging approaches, and help teams and partners adopt effective, state-of-the-art practices.\\\nDemonstrate resiliency to experiment and try multiple AI approaches that may not work — because no one has tried them before.\\\nProvide mentorship and coaching to engineers in, and beyond, your team.\\\nWrite and review clean, well-thought-out code with an emphasis on quality, performance, simplicity, durability, scalability, and maintainability.\\\nContribute positively to a culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self and where we do our best work as a result.
Qualifications
Minimum
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.\nAbility to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:\nMicrosoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred
Prior experience building with Agent SDKs, large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar).\nFamiliarity with agentic AI development patterns — multi-step reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-in-the-loop workflows.\nProven experience as a Software Engineer delivering large-scale, production-quality systems.\nSoftware engineering fundamentals: system design, algorithms, testing, debugging, and code review.\nDemonstrated ability to lead technical direction and mentor peers in a collaborative team environment.\nComfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where best practices are still being established.\nExperience with AI-powered developer tooling and coding assistants, such as, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.\nPrior experience using agentic plugins, agents, skills, hooks, etc.\nExperience dogfooding, evaluating, and forming opinions on emerging AI developer tools, and translating those insights into team-wide best practices.