Principal Software Engineer--M365 Foundation Team

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead the strategic evolution of the Experimentation and Configuration Service (ECS), Microsoft’s platform for safe, scalable, intelligent, and resilient configuration management. As a Principal Software Engineer in ECS, you will be accountable for broad technical direction across a major platform area or cross-team initiative. You will lead complex architecture from ideation to production, create clarity across teams, drive multi-release technical strategy, and influence engineering practices across ECS and partner organizations. This role is for a seasoned technical leader who can operate in ambiguous problem spaces, broker difficult cross-team architecture decisions, and change the momentum of current plans toward higher-impact outcomes. You will help ECS evolve into an agentic-native Continuous Configuration platform for Microsoft services, combining distributed systems expertise, operational excellence, AI-native development, and customer-focused platform strategy. About the ECS Team The ECS team builds the Experimentation and Configuration platform used by Microsoft services to manage safe configuration delivery, experimentation, feature rollout, policy enforcement, telemetry, reliability, authenticated access, and operational governance at scale. ECS is transforming from a traditional configuration platform into an intelligent, agentic-native infrastructure layer. The team is investing in AI-assisted engineering, MCP interfaces, agent-powered troubleshooting, autonomous validation, self-healing workflows, configuration intelligence, and compliance automation to help Microsoft services move faster while reducing operational risk.   Why Join Us This is a great opportunity to shape a foundational Microsoft platform at the moment when configuration management, AI-native engineering, service reliability, and agentic automation are converging. As a Principal Software Engineer in ECS, you will help define the next generation of Continuous Configuration for Microsoft, influencing how services safely ship, validate, diagnose, and recover at global scale. You will work on deeply technical, high-impact problems with broad customer reach, influence cross-team strategy, and help build an engineering system where agents and humans collaborate to deliver safer, faster, and more intelligent platform outcomes. 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.

Strategic Technical Leadership: Define and drive the architecture, roadmap, and execution strategy for a major ECS platform area or cross-team initiative with multi-release impact. Cross-Team Architecture Ownership: Broker complex architecture decisions across ECS, partner teams, PM, security, compliance, and service owners; create shared direction and durable technical alignment. Agentic-Native Platform Transformation: Lead the design and adoption of agentic-native engineering systems, including AI coding agents, MCP interfaces, SKILLs, intelligent automation, and AI-native engineering practices such as harness engineering, loop engineering, and evaluation systems. Technical Vision & Long-Term Direction: Translate ambiguous customer, business, security, reliability, and operational needs into clear technical bets, phased execution plans, and measurable outcomes. Platform Quality & Engineering Excellence: Define quality metrics, coding patterns, validation strategy, telemetry, observability, and operational readiness standards that raise the engineering bar across ECS. Complex Problem Resolution: Resolve the hardest technical and product-system problems in ECS, including