Principal SWE Lead

** Overview*
* MCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.

Within MCAPS - Core, the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support experience. In CSS, we are powered by Microsoft's AI technology to help consumers, businesses, partners, and more, resolve their issues quickly and securely, helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

Microsoft's SCIM organization is seeking a Principal Software AI Engineer to lead the architecture, development, and production deployment of agentic AI solutions that transform support experiences. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who can solve ambiguous, high-impact problems; set engineering direction; and translate support experience intent and readiness requirements into secure, reliable, and scalable AI systems.

You will combine deep software engineering expertise with applied AI judgment to build diagnostics, workflows, evaluation frameworks, and tooling that improve how support teams and customers resolve complex issues. You will work across engineering, product, program management, data, security, Responsible AI, and frontline support teams, influencing technical strategy while remaining close to implementation.

This role is suited to a principal-level engineer who combines strategic influence with deep hands-on execution. The ideal candidate is energized by ambiguous problems, makes sound architectural tradeoffs, learns rapidly as AI technologies evolve, and maintains a high bar for customer impact and operational excellence.

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*
* + Architect and build production-grade AI systems. Design, implement, and operate agentic AI solutions, diagnostic experiences, orchestration workflows, and supporting platforms using governed Pro Code and citizen-development technologies where appropriate.

+ Set technical direction. Define architecture, engineering strategy, design principles, and reusable patterns for AI solutions that must operate securely and reliably at enterprise scale.

+ Lead through code and engineering rigor. Develop critical components, conduct design and code reviews, establish testing standards, and resolve the most complex technical and architectural issues.

+ Integrate with the support ecosystem. Connect AI solutions to Microsoft support systems, APIs, knowledge sources, telemetry, and enterprise data while ensuring appropriate access controls and data handling.

+ Advance agent orchestration and diagnostics. Solve difficult problems in planning, context and state management, tool use, multi-agent coordination, retrieval, grounding, observability, and failure recovery.

+ Build robust evaluation capabilities. Establish technical, unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing for prompts, models, tools, orchestration flows, and system integrations.

+ Validate quality and readiness. Evaluate groundedness, accuracy, task completion, robustness, latency, cost, safety, and failure modes at each deployment milestone in partnership with TPMs and support-domain experts.

+ Deliver enterprise-ready solutions. Deploy and operate services in Microsoft cloud environments in accordance with security, privacy, compliance, Responsible AI, reliability, and scalability requirements.

+ Define measurable outcomes. Establish success metrics and telemetry that demonstrate customer value, support effectiveness, engineering health,…