Principal Software Engineer - Performance

About the role

Overview The Artificial Intelligence Performance team at Microsoft develops AI software that enables running AI models efficiently. We collaborate with our hardware teams and partners, both internal and external, and operate at the intersection of AI algorithmic innovation, purpose-built AI hardware, systems, and software. We are a team of highly capable and motivated people that pride themselves on a collaborative and inclusive culture. We own inference performance of OpenAI and other state of the art LLM models and work directly with OpenAI on the models hosted on the Azure OpenAI service serving some of the largest workloads on the planet with trillions of inferences per day in major Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Bing, SQL Server, and Dynamics. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who can establish direction and lead teams through ambiguous, end-to-end systems challenges. Successful candidates combine strong software engineering fundamentals with deep curiosity about AI workloads, use disciplined measurement to guide decisions, and create alignment across organizational boundaries to deliver measurable production impact. As a Principal Software Engineer - Performance, you will serve as a technical lead for high-impact initiatives spanning AI frameworks, performance engineering, benchmarking, and tooling. You will establish technical direction, drive architectural decisions, and lead engineers across teams through the design and delivery of solutions that improve model velocity, platform efficiency, and production reliability. You will also identify systemic opportunities, align stakeholders around durable architectures and success measures, and remain hands-on in critical areas of implementation. 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.

Responsibilities Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap, and multi-release execution strategy for critical AI framework, performance, benchmarking, or developer-productivity capabilities. Lead technical alignment across teams by shaping architecture and priorities, resolving competing requirements, and holding researchers, product groups, infrastructure owners, and hardware partners accountable to clear decisions, execution plans, and measurable outcomes. Build technical leadership capacity across the organization by mentoring engineers, developing emerging technical leads, establishing high standards for quality and maintainability, and creating an inclusive engineering culture in which teams can execute effectively at scale. Steer ambiguous, cross-stack investigations and investments spanning models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and silicon; set technical priorities, resolve trade-offs, and drive teams to decisions. Provide hands-on technical leadership by setting the engineering approach, delegating and unblocking critical work, and directly contributing through prototypes, critical-path implementation, design and code reviews, complex debugging, and operational readiness. Spearhead common measurement, automation, observability, and engineering mechanisms that turn one-off analyses into scalable platform capabilities. Drive measurable improvements in model onboarding velocity, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency. Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.