This role pays more than
64%
of similar roles. Most pay
$169,550–$226,350
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$198k
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
598 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$119,800–$234,700
across 586 roles with salary data.
Principal Software Engineer for Copilot Evals joins the CADET team to architect and build the production system behind a customer-grounded quality loop. This role involves designing an automated, agentic system that replaces manual signals by connecting heterogeneous data sources, AI agents, evaluation infrastructure, RLE platforms, model telemetry, and human review into a reliable end-to-end pipeline. You will develop scalable services for intent classification, deduplication, and coverage analysis while establishing data contracts and extensible schemas for evaluation cases and rubrics. The role requires expertise in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python to build systems that manage quality gates, automated diagnosis, and regression protection. The work focuses on the technical challenge of transforming raw customer evidence into actionable product improvements through sophisticated infrastructure involving large language model technologies, agent systems, and complex data workflows.
What does a Software Engineer earn in Washington?
Median $202800 from 326 postings across 28 companies.
Architect and lead the end-to-end technical execution for the customer-signal and evaluation system.
Build scalable services and pipelines to reproduce customer pain points through automated data generation and classification.
Automate recurring evaluation executions, quality gates, and result publications for top intents and customers.
Establish data contracts and extensible schemas for customer signals, workflows, rubrics, and regression assets.
Develop quality-attribution workflows that combine automated diagnosis with human review to route losses to appropriate owners.
Create observability tools and benchmarks for pipeline health, agent behavior, and data quality across all workflows.
Design safe human-in-the-loop gates for handling ambiguous data and making consequential quality decisions.
Mentor engineers and improve engineering standards through clear interfaces, testing, security, and technical documentation.
What we're looking for
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 6+ years of experience coding in languages like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python (or equivalent).
Extensive experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, developer platforms, or AI infrastructure in production (preferred).
Demonstrated principal-level technical leadership across teams and organizational boundaries (preferred).
Solid understanding of security, privacy, data governance, and responsible engineering for sensitive data (preferred).
Experience building AI/ML platforms, LLM or agent systems, evaluation infrastructure, experimentation systems, or model pipelines (preferred).
Experience with retrieval, tool-using agents, prompt and rubric management, human-in-the-loop systems, or automated diagnosis (preferred).
Experience building data and workflow platforms that combine batch, streaming, unstructured, and human-generated inputs (preferred).
Experience with RLEs, synthetic environments, post-training pipelines, or large-scale evaluation execution (preferred).
C
C++
C#
Java
JavaScript
Python
Azure Virtual Desktop
Windows 365
client-engineering
Test Automation
Performance Measurement
Observability
Monitoring
Diagnostics