Principal Software Engineer

** Overview*
* The Contact Center AI team is building the conversational AI runtime that powers the next generation of intelligent, agentic customer engagement across chat, digital channels and real-time voice. We deliver Contact Center AI as a highly available, enterprise-grade service that integrates cleanly with Azure and a broad ecosystem of first- and third-party products, enabling any surface to embed rich contact center experiences and advanced AI capabilities out of the box.

We transform Microsoft's advances in foundation models, multimodal systems, and AI agents into production-ready capabilities that help customers resolve complex needs with speed, consistency, and trust. Our mission is to deliver a world-class agentic platform where Copilot agents can reason, plan, act, collaborate with other agents, and transition seamlessly to human experts-turning frontier AI into dependable customer outcomes on a global scale.

Our charter spans the full Microsoft Copilot Studio (MCS) runtime: intelligent agent authoring, orchestration, and invocation; secure tool and connector execution; knowledge grounding and retrieval; and a dynamic evaluation system that continuously measures quality as agents, models, data, and customer behaviors evolve. We use targeted evaluations, and drift detection to identify regressions early, understand their causes, and iterate rapidly-creating a closed learning loop that improves accuracy, resilience, and consistency over time.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the team, you will set the technical direction for the services at the heart of this platform - architecting and shipping production-grade systems across the agentic stack, from real-time voice and orchestration to Copilot agents, tool invocation, and the Copilot Studio runtime that brings them to life. You will take on the hardest problems, pioneer experiences that have never been built, and raise the technical bar for engineers across teams.

We are an AI-first organization: we rethink every workflow in an agentic way, innovate quickly, and collaborate closely with our partners and customers in an agile, fast-paced, high-energy environment. If this opportunity excites you, come and talk to us!

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*
* + Be a great engineer - Design, architect, and ship reliable, production-grade agentic systems across the stack, owning the technical vision, quality, delivery, and support of the services your team builds.

+ Build agentic experiences on the Microsoft Copilot Studio (MCS) runtime - setting the direction for agent orchestration, planning, grounding, memory, multi-agent coordination (A2A), knowledge sources, connectors, the Tool Gateway, and the control plane that ties them together.

+ Pioneer real-time voice agents - low-latency, speech-to-speech experiences with sub-second turn-taking, barge-in, interruption handling, and graceful human hand-off that feel natural in live calls.

+ Build scalable, resilient backend services using event-driven, CQRS, and service mesh patterns, with high-throughput APIs (REST, gRPC), owning the full service lifecycle - CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, on-call, and SLA-driven reliability (99.9%+) - and optimizing for latency, throughput, and cost at enterprise scale.

+ Be customer obsessed - Understand and anticipate the needs of our customers who need to react to an evolving business and…