Principal Software Engineer

** Overview*
* The Ads Data Platform Team, part of Microsoft AI (Artificial Intelligence), is hiring Principal Software Engineer.

This role is available in Redmond, WA.

Our team powers the backbone of Microsoft's global ads marketplace-gathering, storing, and enriching over half a trillion ad-serving events every day. We build data platforms that fuel business analytics, machine learning models, and real-time reporting at massive scale. We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to join the Ads Engineering team and help advance the core capabilities of our Ads serving stack.

If you're passionate about solving complex problems and driving innovation, this is the place for you. This system powers advertisements across a range of Microsoft services, including Bing Search, MSN, , and shopping experiences in the Edge browser. Our serving stack is a high-scale, low-latency, geo-distributed system with numerous components-including large-scale machine learning inference for ad ranking, real-time bidding infrastructure, and other subsystems supporting diverse ad scenarios.

This role offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to the innovation and evolution of a system operating at an exceptional scale and speed. You'll face a wide variety of technical challenges: from designing new features and optimizing performance down to the millisecond, to building scalable infrastructure for containerized services. You'll work alongside a passionate, world-class engineering team, own major feature areas, and collaborate globally.

If you thrive on solving complex technical problems in a dynamic environment, this is the opportunity for you.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

** Responsibilities*
* + Work with Bing Ads stakeholders to determine requirements for new features to drive up Ads business. Create system design for feature requirements. Assure system meets security and compliance requirements and expectations. Creates a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring quality solutions.

+ Implement the features with high efficiency, extensibility, diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability with few defects. Reviews code of product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft's quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product feature.

+ Maintain operations of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Identifies solutions and mitigations to simple and complex issues and escalates as necessary. Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) working on call to monitor system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Responds within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe. Escalate issues to appropriate owners.

+ Build knowledge, share new ideas, and share pinpoints of engineering tool gaps to improve software developer tools to support other programs, tools, and applications to create, debug, and maintain code for product features. Contribute to the development of automation within production and deployment of a product feature.

+ Profile and analyze distributed system performance and capacity bottlenecks. Propose and implement solutions to improve system latency and capacity to meet Bing Ads online serving requirements.

** Qualifications*
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* Required Qualifications:

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* + 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:

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

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* Preferred Qualifications:

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* + Master'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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in…