Principal Software Engineer-Backend

The Windows and Web Experiences (WWE) - Indexserve platform team is hiring a Principal Software Engineer-Backend with a keen interest in building large-scale distributed systems to enable more innovations on the search, recommendation, and AI services and products in Redmond, WA.

WWE platform focuses on providing a search and recommendation platform for Microsoft internal partners using the documentation recall and reranking backend service suite.

As a team, we manage one of the world’s largest distributed systems and have experienced great success in building efficient large scale distributed systems for search. This team builds a reliable ranking and caption serving platform for Bing Search.

Within the WWE platform, we are the IndexServe and query alternation team and we have the exciting responsibility of tackling these challenges. We aim to build the most agile, performant, stable, and efficient index serving platform.

On this platform, relevance techniques can be quickly implemented, iterated, qualified, and flighted to evaluate their customer impacts with convenience while ensuring full funnel debuggability.

The same platform also provides cutting-edge techniques and utilities, like deep learning, machine learning, LLM, JavaScript, and C# rankers. It has the most advanced AI toolset for our scientists to innovate and for our products to serve the most relevant documents.

The WWE platform team has a rare opportunity to simplify the serving stack, to serve the biggest index in the most efficient way, and to drive up the relevance innovations with advanced deep learning and Large Language model techniques. The agility of engineering and deployment also presents a big challenge when handling such a complex system. As Bing embraces the newest LLM innovations, the need for a platform to build up AI intelligence is becoming bigger.

In this role, you will drive and deliver cutting-edge techniques such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) by collaborating with AI data scientists.

Responsibilities

We are looking for Principal Software engineers with a proven background in:

• Agile service feature development.
• Innovative algorithm design for best performance, latency, scalability, and efficiency.
• Service performance profiling and scaling-up.
• Advanced distributed service debugging.
• Collaborating across multiple teams to design and deliver solutions.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline 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.
• 3+ years of experience in highly available, reliable and distributed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in C++, systems level programming, and highly available systems is preferred.
• Experience in high-performance computing (e.g., cache/memory optimization, high-performance GPU programming, compiler-based optimization, fine-grained parallel library, and runtime) or distributed systems (e.g., communication optimization, network architecture design, network programming) is a plus.
• Capable of quantitatively implementing and qualifying a solution in a distributed environment with a DevOps model.
• Experience in building Machine Learning/Deep Learning systems is a plus.
• Experience in performance analysis and optimization for both CPUs and GPUs, as well as a good understanding of software-hardware co-design, is a plus.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $133,600 - $256,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $173,200 - $282,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here .

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.