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Principal Software Engineering - AI Frameworks

Microsoft

Software Engineering, Data Science

Mountain View, CA, USA · Redmond, WA, USA

USD 139,900-274,800 / year

Posted on Feb 5, 2026

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Overview

Are you looking for opportunities to deliver innovations to hundreds of millions of users that impact their daily life? Do you want to be part of a fast-cycle, highly competitive, and hardcore AI/ML frameworks team with ambitious goals to advance AI technology?

The AI Frameworks team at Microsoft develops software that pushes the cutting edge of performance and experience in machine learning in production and research. We bridge the gap between the latest state-of-the-art AI models and hardware eco-systems. We build software to enable running AI models everywhere, from the world’s fastest super cloud computers, to servers, desktops, mobile phones, IoT devices, and internet browsers. The framework we develop is powering AI experience for all major Microsoft products, such as Windows, Office, Microsoft 365, Bing, SQL Server, VSCode, Cognitive Service, Copilot+ PC, and many others.

As the Principal Software Engineer on our team, you would have the opportunity to work on:

ONNX: an open standard format for representing AI models, enabling AI developers to work on AI models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes, and compilers.
ONNX Runtime: ONNX based cross-platform, high performance ML inferencing and training accelerator.
Foundry Local: an on-device AI inference solution offering performance, privacy, customization, and cost advantages. It integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows and applications through an intuitive CLI, SDK, and REST API.

We value our team members’ happiness and encourage everyone to constantly learn new things and take risks. We collaborate closely and openly to accomplish big things together while having fun.

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.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer on the team the common tasks of the job would include, but not be limited to

Partnering with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for one or more complex scenarios.
Providing technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
Leading by example and mentoring others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company.
Leveraging deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items.
Holding accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
Proactively seeking new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.
Embodying our Culture and Values

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability 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:

Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or preferred qualifications

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.
Experience developing Inference software stack.
Experience working on systems performance optimization.
Working with Open-Source code.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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

Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $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.

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