Principal Software Engineer (Customer & Product Engineering)

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Customer Experience Engineering team operates within the Office of the CTO for the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization, which focuses on Microsoft’s Cloud and AI Platform.

We are looking for a hands-on cloud Principal Software Engineer (Customer & Product Engineering) based in the United States to join our diverse, talented, high-performing, and growing Customer Experience Engineering (CXE) team. This is a deeply technical engineering role offering the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging and impactful customer projects using the Azure platform, while also contributing directly to core Azure services and helping shape the evolution of the platform.

This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic customer engagement, contributing to both customer success and the development of an observability-focused Azure service approaching general availability — including on-call participation as part of the service engineering team. You will work across customer environments and core product engineering, helping improve how production workloads are designed, monitored, and operated at scale. 

A Principal Software Engineer (Customer & Product Engineering) within CXE is an individual contributor who operates globally and engages directly with customers. The role spans design, development, and production operations, combining deep engineering work with real-world problem solving to accelerate customer adoption of Azure at scale. Engineers are expected to comfortably move between architectural design discussions, hands-on development, and live production troubleshooting using tools such as the Azure Portal and Visual Studio.

This is a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of customer engineering and platform innovation, solving complex technical challenges while contributing into core Azure services.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

• Driving engineering impact with strategic Azure customers: Working directly with some of Microsoft’s most strategic customers to design, build, and optimize production-grade applications on Azure, reducing technical debt and enabling scalable architectures.
• Building and evolving an observability-focused service: Contributing to the design, development, and continuous improvement of a new platform capability that enhances monitoring, diagnostics, and operational visibility for cloud workloads.  
• Owning production reliability and operations: Supporting live production environments through on-call participation, incident investigation, and and implementing engineering improvements that enhance reliability and performance.
• Creating reusable engineering assets: Developing technical assets, tools, guidance, and reference implementations that enable repeatable customer success at scale and accelerate Azure adoption.
• Influencing Azure platform engineering: Collaborating with other product teams to represent real-world customer experience and drive improvements across other Azure services.
• Strengthening technical capability across CE&S: Developing and supporting technical teams to deepen engineering expertise and delivery quality across the field organization. 

Required/minimum qualifications

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.