Principal Software Engineer, AI Ads

What you'll do

• Lead the strategy, design, development, and optimization of global, low-latency shopping ads, travel, and product graph systems
• Partner with scientists, engineers, and product leaders to turn research and prototypes into reliable production systems
• Advance AI-native development through coding agents, agentic engineering, harness engineering, and vibe coding
• Drive cross-organizational initiatives, make key architectural decisions, and identify opportunities aligned with Microsoft’s commerce and advertising strategy
• Mentor engineers, raise technical excellence, and reshape AI-driven development workflows

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements including Microsoft Cloud Background Check
• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience OR equivalent experience
• Extensive experience architecting, developing, and operating highly reliable, massive-scale, globally distributed production systems, particularly big data infrastructure
• Hands-on expertise in online advertising, information retrieval, large-scale data processing, microservices, distributed systems, real-time streaming technologies such as Kafka, Flink, or Spark Streaming, or AI infrastructure
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical strategy and influence key decisions
• Hands-on experience with AI-driven development practices including coding agents, agentic workflows, harness engineering, or AI-assisted software development
• Solid communication and collaboration skills across globally distributed, multidisciplinary teams
• Experience building product or knowledge graphs including product identity, entity resolution, taxonomy, attribute extraction, graph modeling, indexing, and low-latency retrieval at global scale
• Solid background in computational advertising, recommender systems, search engines, or large-scale commerce platforms
• Experience with .NET, NoSQL databases, Azure, ADLA or ADLS, Azure Data Factory, Airflow, Presto, SQL, Kusto, Docker, Kubernetes, or AI model inference platforms
• Startup and entrepreneurial mindset with comfort in uncertainty, bias for action, customer focus, continuous learning, and rapid experimentation
• Ability to quickly evaluate, adopt, and apply emerging AI technologies
• Passion for solving complex technical problems and improving system performance, scalability, reliability, and developer productivity
• Fast learner and ability to independently manage and complete multiple tasks

Tech stack

Benefits