Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Brand Agents is redefining how businesses show up on the agentic web. We build brand-aligned, conversational AI agents that represent a business to consumers and to other AI agents—grounded in the brand’s products, inventory, pricing, policies, and voice. Brand Agents engage customers directly on a merchant’s own site and extend that same trusted representation into Microsoft Copilot, Bing, Microsoft Advertising experiences, and agent-to-agent interactions through open protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Our mission is to turn every brand into an authoritative, callable AI endpoint: one that helps people discover, compare, and decide—and lets AI assistants take action on their behalf, from product discovery and recommendations to quotes, bookings, leads, and transactions. Along the way, conversations generate rich insights that help businesses understand customer needs and improve outcomes.

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the technical direction of the Brand Agents platform. You’ll architect and build the systems that ingest and ground agents on business data at scale, orchestrate large language models and tools to reason and act reliably, and expose brand capabilities to humans and AI agents across Microsoft surfaces and the broader ecosystem. You’ll partner closely with product, applied science, design, and Microsoft Advertising teams, and your work will directly influence how millions of consumers and thousands of businesses connect in the age of AI.

This role is a great fit for someone who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys building zero-to-one products on top of large-scale distributed systems, and wants to lead through deep technical expertise in AI-powered experiences.

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.

AI Experiences employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft Hub in the U.S. are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and architecture for the Brand Agents platform, spanning business data ingestion, grounding, agent orchestration, and multi-surface delivery.

Design and build agentic systems that use large language models, retrieval, and tool/function calling to understand user intent, plan, and take reliable actions on behalf of businesses and consumers.

Build scalable pipelines that ingest, normalize, and keep fresh brand data—product catalogs, inventory, pricing, policies, and business information—to ground agents with accurate, trustworthy, and up-to-date knowledge.

Expose brand capabilities as secure, callable endpoints using open protocols such as MCP and agent-to-agent (A2A) interfaces, enabling AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot to discover, converse with, and transact through Brand Agents.

Partner with applied science to develop evaluation, experimentation, and quality frameworks that measure agent accuracy, groundedness, safety, brand alignment, and business outcomes.

Integrate Brand Agents with Microsoft Advertising, Bing, and Copilot experiences, including measurement and insights that help businesses understand customer needs and conversion barriers.

Drive engineering excellence across reliability, latency, cost efficiency, security, privacy, and Responsible AI for customer-facing, real-time AI services; act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) for live-site operations.

Lead cross-team technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and foster a culture of high-quality execution, innovation, and accountability.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Experience building and shipping production applications powered by large language models, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt and tool orchestration, and agent frameworks.

Experience designing and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems and cloud services in production.

Experience building data ingestion and processing pipelines for structured content such as product catalogs or business data.

Experience with evaluation and experimentation for AI systems, including offline metrics, online A/B testing, and quality and safety measurement.

Familiarity with agent interoperability protocols and APIs (e.g., MCP, A2A) and with conversational or commerce experiences.

Experience in online advertising, e-commerce, or search platforms.

4+ years of experience as a technical lead, influencing technical direction across teams and mentoring engineers.

#MicrosoftAI

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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

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.

Insights from previous hires

Top skills: Computer Science, Big Data, Science, Communication, C++, Active Directory, NET Framework, Marketing, HoloLens, Experimental Physics

Common previous titles: Software Engineer II, Tech Support Engineer, Senior Scientist, Senior Data Scientist, Specialist, Software Engineering, Software Engineer, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Security Researcher