This role pays more than
66%
of similar roles. Most pay
$174,600–$225,000
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$200k
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.
As a Principal Software Engineer within Microsoft Research, you will join a global team focused on building high-performance infrastructure to accelerate the research lifecycle. You will be responsible for designing, testing, and maintaining large-scale research platforms that power compute clusters while optimizing performance across diverse hardware. Your daily work involves developing end-to-end systems, libraries, and tools, including agentic workflows to automate development loops. The role requires expertise in distributed computing, GPU programming with CUDA and NCCL, and frameworks like PyTorch. You will also navigate complex networking, storage systems, and distributed training parallelisms. To succeed, you must be proficient in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python. This position addresses the critical challenge of bridging general AI with specialized applications by building robust infrastructure for large-scale machine learning and generative AI workloads.
What does a Software Engineer earn in Washington?
Median $202800 from 326 postings across 28 companies.