below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
56%
of similar roles. Most pay
$168,187–$248,137
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$208k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology leader producing software, hardware, and cloud services including Windows, Office 365, Azure cloud platform, Xbox gaming, and Surface devices. Industry: Software & Cloud Computing
Microsoft currently has
694 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$119,800–$234,700
across 651 roles with salary data.
The Platform Systems Engineering team is seeking a Principal AI Back-End Network Systems Lead to serve as the technical lead and end-to-end product development owner for Back End Network across both scale-up and scale-out. This role involves leading the product from requirements and architecture through design, integration, validation, manufacturing readiness, deployment, and fleet learning. You will manage silicon, network adapters, switches, interconnects, optics, and electrical channels to solve complex AI training and inference requirements. Key responsibilities include defining scalable architectures, overseeing high-speed links, and optimizing collective operations like all-reduce and all-gather. You will utilize expertise in Ethernet, RDMA, SerDes/PHY, FEC, and SONiC/Linux networking to ensure high-performance behavior across physical, data-link, network, and transport layers for distributed AI workloads.
Own the end-to-end product definition and execution plan for Back End Network across scale-up and scale-out systems.
Translate AI training and inference requirements into measurable system targets for bandwidth, latency, reliability, and power.
Lead architecture and integration for accelerator silicon, NICs, switches, cables, and fabric topologies.
Oversee electrical and optical technologies for high-speed links, including signal integrity, SerDes/PHY, and FEC.
Define and validate Ethernet/RDMA protocol behaviors such as flow control, congestion control, and routing.
Connect network architecture to distributed AI workloads, parallelism strategies, and collective operations like all-reduce.
Establish analytical models to predict bottlenecks and validate architectural assumptions for topology, bandwidth, and cost.
Own the end-to-end validation strategy covering functionality, stress, resiliency, and manufacturing readiness.
What we're looking for
Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 7+ years of technical engineering experience.
Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience.
Equivalent experience to the degree and years of experience requirements.
Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check.
Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field and 10+ years of relevant experience (preferred).
6+ years of experience designing, developing, integrating, or validating networking for AI/ML, HPC, accelerator, or large-scale cloud systems (preferred).
Deep hands-on expertise in at least one AI/ML networking domain such as scale-up interconnects, switch systems, or scale-out Ethernet/RDMA fabrics (preferred).
Demonstrated experience leading a complex hardware/software product through requirements, architecture, development, integration, validation, and production deployment (preferred).
C/C++
RDMA
RoCE
InfiniBand
DPDK
DOCA
NCCL
CUDA
Networking Protocols
Distributed Systems
Firmware
Performance Tuning
Congestion Control
QoS
Telemetry
Automation
Remote (Santa Clara, CA)+3137 days ago
$272,000–$431,250
Python
C++
PyTorch
CUDA
NCCL
RDMA
MPI
RoCE
Deep Learning
Distributed Systems
Bash
TensorFlow
High-Performance Networking
Benchmarking
Profiling
HCA
SHARP