Backend Engineer II

** Overview*
* The Backend Engineer II role independently applies appropriate artificial intelligence tools and best practices throughout the software development lifecycle. The engineer collaborates with internal stakeholders to understand customer and user requirements for a set of features. They create clear and effective test strategies to ensure solution quality and execute thorough test plans. The role involves writing extensible and maintainable code for backend services to minimize defects, reviewing code to assure proper test coverage and adherence to team standards, and implementing debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions.

Aim to automate production deployments targeting zero-touch processes when possible. The engineer applies and reviews coding patterns, security risks, and compliance issues to achieve security hardening across product features. This role is in the Messaging Platform team that supports the backend services serving hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer users across Teams and Copilot.

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*
* ** AI-native development*
* + Uses AI tools and practices across the software development lifecycle in a disciplined way, from design and coding through testing, code review and incident investigation. Takes responsibility for every AI-generated change: reviews it fully and applies the right tooling and processes with minimal guidance.

** Coding*
* + Writes, and reuses where it makes sense, extensible, maintainable code for messaging services and features with minimal supervision. Considers how easy it is to diagnose, how reliable it is and how well it handles concurrency, ordering and idempotency, with few defects. Knows when code is ready to ship.

+ Uses debugging, tests, logs and telemetry to check assumptions before issues reach production. Runs incident retrospectives to find root causes, puts repair items in place and prevents recurrence, using least-access principles and protecting privacy throughout.

+ Reviews product and test code promptly for correctness, test coverage, security risks, compliance issues and maintainability. Uses automated code analysis tools and coaches peers through useful review feedback.

** Design*
* + Reviews and comments on architecture proposals for globally distributed messaging systems, such as ingestion, fan-out, storage, sync and notification, with technical leadership from others. Explores design options and lays out the trade-offs of each, and owns some design decisions.

+ Helps make sure designs meet requirements for performance, scalability, resiliency and cost of goods sold (COGS) at the scale of billions of messages a day. Upholds Microsoft security, privacy and compliance standards.

+ Contributes to design documents. Identifies dependencies and downstream interactions across the platform (storage, identity, Substrate, Teams and Copilot clients and services) and works with partner teams where dependencies and validation overlap.

+ Creates clear test strategies that prevent regressions. Runs test plans that include security testing, including negative cases, with minimal supervision. Designs for testability and uses AI tools for test automation.

** Engineering excellence*
* + Contributes to deployment automation for complex messaging features, aiming for zero-touch deployment. Validates code in non-production and production-like environments.

+ Applies security best practices and "security as code" in variants. Contributes to security review standards, security deployment gates and scanners, and security monitoring. Works with security partners on threat models, premortems, breach drills and incident response, and makes sure AI safety features are in place for AI-powered capabilities.

+ Works with partner teams before go-live so end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance and DRI escalation paths are in place.

+ Follows the processes for security, privacy, safety and accessibility. Checks for visible evidence of compliance, such as audit trails, and keeps up with global and local regulations that affect messaging data, such as…