Overview
Microsoft Advertising makes billions of decisions every day across search, native, shopping, display, audience, and AI-powered advertising experiences.
We are looking for a Principal Software Architect to define the technical direction for Ads Quality at global scale.
Quality decisions can depend on ads, landing pages, advertisers, businesses, account history, behavioral patterns, and signals that may be incomplete, delayed, noisy, or changing. The challenge is to turn this evidence into systems that are accurate, scalable, measurable, and continuously improving.
This is a hands-on software engineering role spanning distributed systems, production AI, decision systems, entity intelligence, agentic workflows, and measurement.
Responsibilities
Define the long-term architecture for Ads Quality across signals, entity understanding, model execution, decisioning, feedback, and measurement.
Establish how quality systems should reason across ads, landing pages, advertisers, businesses, relationships, and behavior over time.
Design architectures that support heterogeneous AI systems including lightweight models, multimodal models, LLMs, agents, and deterministic systems.
Define how evidence, model outputs, confidence, calibration, thresholds, and decision policies come together in production.
Set technical direction across real-time, nearline, and offline systems, balancing quality, latency, freshness, cost, and reliability.
Drive convergence where common abstractions create leverage and challenge unnecessary duplication or complexity.
Partner with Applied Science on how new model capabilities should shape system architecture.
Prototype difficult ideas when that is the fastest way to establish technical feasibility.
Influence implementation through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on engagement with critical systems.
15+ years of software engineering experience, or equivalent technical depth.
Deep experience architecting large-scale production systems spanning multiple teams.
Strong expertise in distributed systems, production AI/ML systems, decision systems, or large-scale data platforms.
Strong understanding of model serving, experimentation, evaluation, observability, rollout, and feedback loops.
Ability to reason across software architecture and model behavior without treating ML as a black box.
Track record of simplifying complex systems and turning ambiguous technical problems into durable architecture.
Ability to influence senior engineers and technical leaders across organizational boundaries.
Experience with advertising, quality systems, entity intelligence, multimodal AI, agentic systems, behavioral systems, or large-scale inference is valuable.
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: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Automation, Architecture, Analytics, Algorithms, Agile Methodologies, Azure Cloud, Award, Advanced Design System (ADS), Usage Performance
Common previous titles: Software Engineer II, Software Engineer, Senior, Senior Software Engineer, Tech, Software Engineer 2, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Senior Finance Manager
Job description provided by Microsoft.
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