Principal Applied AI Engineer

Microsoft is hiring a hands-on technical architect and individual contributor to build production agentic AI services for Azure customer support. In this role, you will own end-to-end architecture and drive measurable impact through evaluation, reliability, security, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build production agentic AI systems, including scalable AI agents and services with LLM orchestration, multi-agent workflows, RAG pipelines, tool integrations, and memory and state management, as well as human-in-the-loop experiences.
• Lead through hands-on engineering by writing, reviewing, and maintaining production-quality C# and Python code, developing reusable platform capabilities, and delivering reference implementations and prototypes.
• Own end-to-end technical delivery by translating ambiguous customer support scenarios into technical requirements and guiding solutions from architecture and experimentation through implementation, deployment, operation, and ongoing iteration.
• Define technical architecture and engineering standards, including architecture patterns, API and data contracts, code quality expectations, evaluation practices, deployment strategies, and observability standards for AI services.
• Advance evaluation-driven AI development by designing evaluation frameworks with rubrics, golden datasets, simulation, judge models, and offline and online evaluation, including quality thresholds for moving agents from experimentation to shadow mode and autonomous operation.
• Own production quality and reliability by ensuring AI services meet correctness, availability, latency, scalability, cost, and safety expectations, and by leading diagnosis, technical incident response, root cause analysis, and systemic improvements.
• Design for responsible and secure AI by embedding privacy protections and defenses such as prompt-injection protections, tool authorization and action controls, data boundaries, auditability, and fail-safe behavior.
• Make consequential technical decisions using evidence from experiments and production telemetry, balancing quality with reliability, maintainability, latency, cost, and operational complexity.
• Influence product and platform roadmaps by partnering with product managers, researchers, platform engineers, and Azure service teams, translating support patterns and operational signals into durable technical investments.
• Drive measurable customer and business impact by instrumenting systems and improving automation accuracy, case volume reduction, resolution time, engineering efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
• Provide technical leadership across teams through architecture reviews, resolution of complex technical disagreements, and clear communication with engineering teams, senior leaders, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Raise the organization’s engineering capability by mentoring engineers in system design, software engineering, applied AI, and evaluation-driven development, including guidance on where AI agents should or should not act autonomously.

Requirements

• 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.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements for this role.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: required to pass upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Technologies

• C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python
• LLM orchestration, multi-agent workflows, RAG
• Rubrics, golden datasets, simulation, judge models
• Offline and online evaluation
• Prompt-injection defenses

Preferred Qualifications

• 15 years of professional software engineering and enterprise architecture experience designing, building, integrating, and operating complex production software systems at enterprise scale.
• Alternative education and experience options: a Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field with 8+ years coding experience; OR a Bachelor's Degree with 12+ years coding experience (including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python) or equivalent experience.
• Deep hands-on software development background combined with enterprise architecture expertise, including translating business and technical requirements into scalable, resilient, and maintainable system architectures.
• Proficiency in C# and/or Python with demonstrated ability to design and implement production-quality services and distributed systems.
• Experience with applied AI systems, including LLM-based applications, prompt engineering, RAG architectures, agent frameworks, or machine learning services.
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Azure, and cloud-native practices such as microservices, APIs, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and align multiple teams without direct management authority.
• Experience implementing agent security patterns including prompt-injection defense, identity propagation, least-privilege tool access, data-boundary enforcement, approval gates, and auditable actions.
• Ability to move between strategic architecture and detailed implementation, including debugging complex interactions across models, prompts, tools, data, and distributed services.
• Business acumen connecting technical investments to measurable customer outcomes such as case volume reduction, resolution time, automation quality, and customer satisfaction.
• Track record mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams without formal people management responsibilities.
• Background in customer support engineering, supportability, diagnostics, or customer experience platforms.

Location and Compensation

Location: Redmond, WA (onsite).

Salary range: USD 142,800 - 304,200 per year.

Typical base pay range across the U.S. (Software Engineering IC5): USD 142,800 - 274,800 per year.

Different range for specific work locations (San Francisco Bay Area and New York City Metropolitan): USD 188,000 - 304,200 per year.

Additional Information

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Additional details are available at: 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.

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field.