Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Overview
Bing Sports builds experiences for live scores, schedules, standings, news, and sports knowledge across Bing. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set technical direction and deliver high-scale, low-latency services and experiences, partnering with product, data science, design, and engineering teams. You’ll be a hands-on leader who drives architecture, raises quality, mentors engineers, and ensures reliability and operational.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile  commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from  the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction. 

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end design and delivery for Bing Sports components (APIs, services, pipelines, integrations) from concept to production and sustainment.
• Define architecture for scalable distributed systems; set SLOs/SLIs; build observability and on-call readiness.
• Set engineering standards and lead design/code reviews for security, reliability, performance, testing, and maintainability.
• Partner with PM to translate customer needs into technical roadmaps and investment sequencing (features, platform, tech debt).
• Build and improve sports data ingestion/normalization with data quality, provenance, and monitoring.
• Improve answer quality via experimentation and evaluation; collaborate with data science on model/service integration.
• Optimize latency and cost through performance tuning, caching, and storage/indexing choices.
• Drive cross-team integrations with shared platforms (identity, compliance, experimentation, knowledge/content systems).
• Mentor engineers and set a high bar for operational ownership and craftsmanship.
• Serve as an escalation point for incidents; lead RCA and drive preventative fixes.

Qualifications

Required qualifications:

• BS in CS/Engineering (or equivalent experience). 

• 10+ years building and shipping production services at scale. 

• Strong coding in C#, Java, C++, Go, and/or Python; comfortable in multi-language codebases. 

• Hands-on distributed systems experience (storage, caching, consistency, failure modes, capacity planning). 

• Cloud-native engineering (e.g., Azure), CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and secure engineering practices. 

• Proven technical leadership through influence: architecture decisions, stakeholder alignment, mentorship. 

• Track record of reliable, observable, maintainable systems with strong testing and operational ownership. 

Preferred qualifications:

• Consumer products at high traffic/strict latency (search, recs, feeds, real-time answers). 

• Large-scale batch/stream processing and external data quality management. 

• Experimentation frameworks (A/B testing, feature flags, metric definition/analysis). 

• Search/relevance, knowledge/entity systems, or ML-in-production integration. 

• Sports data domain knowledge and/or experience with third-party sports data providers. 

• Leading cross-team initiatives spanning multiple services and partner orgs. 

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.

Experience Level

Senior Level