Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Job d:

Location:

United States, Washington, Redmond Salary: USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year

Employment type:

Full-Time Work site: 0 days / week in-office – remote

Role type:
Individual Contributor Travel: 50-75%
Profession:
Software Engineering Discipline:
Software Engineering Company:
Microsoft Overview Windows  is where most of the world's developers build, and the agentic era is rewriting what they need from the platform underneath them. Coding agents, local inference, containerized tool chains and AI-native workflows are all arriving at once — and the engineering organizations adopting them fastest are the ones whose experience should be shaping Windows. The Windows Platform and Developers (WPD) organization is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team to close that loop directly.

Forward Deployed Engineers embed with strategic partners and enterprise developer organizations, build alongside their engineers inside their environments, and own the outcome: the customer's developers and agents running production workloads on Windows. We are measured on adoption. Not revenue, not renewals, not tickets closed. When a customer's engineering organization moves a real workload onto Windows and keeps it there, that is the result.

As a Principal Software Engineer, Forward Deployed, you are one of the founding technical leaders of this team. You will own our hardest and most strategic engagements end to end — frontier AI labs, silicon partners, and the enterprise engineering organizations whose adoption decision sets the pattern for everyone watching them — and you will define how forward-deployed engineering works at Windows scale: the engagement model, the technical bar, the reusable asset library, and the path from field evidence into platform roadmaps.

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.

Employees who live within fifty miles of the Redmond campus must be in the office for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Responsibilities Own the flagship engagements Take personal, end-to-end technical ownership of the engagements with the highest stakes: partners building on and alongside Windows, silicon partners whose platforms define the AI developer experience, and enterprise engineering organizations whose choices move the market. Discover: get inside a customer's actual engineering reality — their architecture, their roadmap, their constraints, and the honest reason Windows is or is not their default.

Establish the problem statement, the baseline, the agreed success measures and the plan. Build: work in their codebase and in ours. Design and ship the integrations, prototypes, reference implementations, tooling and platform changes that make adoption real. Apply engineering standards — security, privacy, maintainability, supportability — to work that will run in production long after the engagement ends. Validate: prove the outcome with measurement the customer agrees with, not with a demo.

Stay hands-on:
Write the prototypes, read the traces, work in the customer's repository. Your credibility with partner engineering leadership rests on doing the work, not describing it. Be the technical face of Windows to engineering leadership Hold the technical relationship with partner chief technical officers (CTOs), engineering vice presidents (VPs) and principal engineers — and hold the same credibility with the engineers doing the work.

Deliver unwelcome answers well.…