Principal FDE - Software Engineer

Overview

The AI Transformation team within Microsoft Frontier Company is reimagining how the company operates in the age of AI. We work across the business to transform critical end-to-end workflows, bringing people, AI agents, and systems together to create fundamentally new ways of working.Our team brings together engineering, applied AI, program leadership, and business transformation to move rapidly from opportunity to working solution. We operate with a builder mindset: hands-on, highly collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity, and biased toward action. Our goal is not simply to add AI to existing processes, but to build AI-native operating models and reusable solutions that improve how Microsoft Frontier Company works and accelerate transformation at scale.As a Principcal Engineer, you will bring strong software design and engineering expertise to build AI-powered solutions that transform how Microsoft Frontier Company operates. You’ll work in small, multidisciplinary teams to rapidly move from prototype to production, using AI and agentic coding tools to build reliable applications, agents, integrations, and workflows that deliver measurable operational impact.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

Design, build, test, deploy, and operate production-grade AI-powered applications, agents, services, integrations, and workflows that transform how Microsoft Frontier Company operates.Rapidly move from requirements and ideas to working solutions, prototyping and iterating based on real-world feedback while maintaining high standards for reliability, performance, and maintainability.Use AI-assisted and agentic coding tools throughout the software development lifecycle to accelerate development, testing, debugging, experimentation, and delivery.Translate business and operational requirements into practical technical designs and scalable implementations, working closely with engineers, applied scientists, TPMs, designers, and operational teams.Apply strong software engineering practices including code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation, and operational readiness.Build reusable components, accelerators, and engineering patterns that enable successful solutions to scale across teams and transformation scenarios.Learn and adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, experimenting with emerging AI technologies and continuously improving solutions based on measurable outcomes.Apply a security-first mindset and incorporate privacy, Responsible AI, compliance, and Microsoft engineering requirements throughout design and delivery.

Design 

Oversees, influences, and owns efforts and design discussions for the overall system architecture of entire products/solutions that are deeply complex and often ambiguous. Owns creating proposals for architecture and design documents and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents for designs or User Stories and determines the technology that will be leveraged and how they will interact. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, owns design decisions. Provides technical leadership to assure system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations. 

Establishes best practices and mentors' others to create a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring quality of solutions, and defines success for outcomes of tests (e.g., unit tests). Identifies needs and sets standards for a broad versus selected approach in testing mechanisms and makes informed decisions to implement the most effective tests. Provides technical leadership in efforts to add new tests, remove antiquated tests, and aggregate tests to improve the overall test suite across a solution or product. Improves recommendations to across teams. Provides expertise. Leads and mentors' others to integrate automation when planning for testing. 

Provides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform. Leads identification of other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's system may provide support to others. Leads efforts to determine back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product. Helps to create relationships and links impacting up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, driving reliability in the solutions, and optimize dependency chains and retrieves across teams. Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. Enables and fosters cross-team communications and resolves conflicts between teams. 

Coding 

Leads by example and mentors' others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company. Leads efforts to optimize, debug, refactor, and reuse code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Identifies best practices and coding patterns and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices. 

Acts as an expert on debugging tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and leads verification of assumptions through writing and developing code proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur across products and teams. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations. Leads retrospective debugging of solutions to identify root causes of problems. 

Provides technical leadership during code reviews for a solution/product area 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. Ensures coding standards are followed. Screens for and establishes best practices in reviews and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. 

Implement 

Leverages deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates only the most critical issues. 

Leads efforts for creation and conducting of experimentation to determine the effectiveness of changes, monitors developments for prototyping and testing products, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value. 

Leads the creation of implementation framework as necessary, following industry standards. Leads implementation and deployment of the solution in the existing framework. Holds accountability for the impact of build deployments on both users and other services. Optimizes deployments across products and components to meet differing business objectives. Leads efforts to assure that solutions are deployed safely. 

Reliability and Supportability 

Leads efforts in the maintenance of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Implements and helps others implement solutions and mitigations to complex issues impacting the performance or functionality of Live Site services. Reviews systematic issues and ensures solutions. Ensures playbooks are logical and understandable. Uses feedback from other solutions to inform preventative measures. Reviews and writes complex issues postmortem and shares insights across teams. 

Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and mentors' other engineers across products/solutions, working on call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for complex issues. Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues. Coordinates people and resources to ensure DRI responsibilities are covered across teams. Responds within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe. Has line of sight to incidences and plans to address emerging issues. Leads efforts to reduce incident volume, looking globally at incidences and providing broad resolutions. Escalates issues to appropriate owners. 

Acts as an expert in design and integration and signs-off on work of others across teams or multiple products on telemetry in systems and products to provide feedback on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and implement safety mechanisms resulting in iterative feedback loops resulting in subsequent designs. Ensures solutions are scalable, financially responsible, and meet capture/storage guidelines. Sets expectations for outputs of telemetry such as notifications or dashboards. 

Provides technical leadership in efforts to collect, classify, and analyze complex data and analyses on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring). Leads the refinement of products through deeply complex data analytics and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. 

Engineering Excellence 

Shares and teaches others best practices about new tools and strategies. Leads efforts and mentors' others to build software developer tools to support other programs and applications to create, debug, and maintain code across products. Uses open source when possible. Holds subject matter expertise in other tools inside and outside areas of expertise. Leads identification of internal tools and creation of new tools that will be useful for creating the product, determining if methods are still applicable for the current solution. Shares best practices and teaches others about new tools and strategies. 

Leads the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across complex products. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across complex products. Defines and develops standardized, repeatable, scalable solutions to guarantee quality. 

Provides technical leadership through efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams. Leads in developing and assures the presence of visible evidence to demonstrate compliance for products. Develops and maintains a deep understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. 

Remains current by investing time and effort into staying abreast of current developments. Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers. 

Applies, extrapolates, and helps to create best practices and shares information with other engineers to reliably build code that is based on well-established methods while also applying best practices for new code development. Provides thought leadership and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are followed and met. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and holds accountability for product/solution areas that do not meet expectations. 

Leads efforts to initiate and maintain communication with key partners across Microsoft ecosystem of engineers. Acts as a primary contact for leadership to ensure alignment with partners' expectations. Builds partner teams across Microsoft (e.g., Xbox, Office) and their end goals for products to drive and achieve desirable user experiences and fitting dynamic needs of partners/customers through product development. Proactively escalates situations to strategic network when resolving complex blockers. 

Other 

Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

QualificationsRequired/Minimum Qualifications:Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field AND technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. 

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across United Kingdom is £ 93,500.00 - £ 161,800.00 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.

Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/corporate-pay/united-kingdom-corporate-pay.html

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.