This role pays more than
85%
of similar roles. Most pay
$174,600–$225,000
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$231k
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, you will join the engineering team to design and ship end-to-end AI systems ranging from exploration to production. You will build agentic workflows, tool-using systems, and retrieval/grounding pipelines while optimizing for safety, latency, and cost at cloud scale. Your daily work involves collaborating with research and product teams to adapt and fine-tune multimodal LLMs and SLMs for real customer scenarios. You will lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and champion high standards for reliability and inclusive experiences. The role requires expertise in Python, C#, or C++, along with experience in Azure, vector stores, and RAG. You will solve complex problems involving model orchestration, prompt evaluation, and performance optimization while ensuring responsible AI practices and secure data handling across the entire product lifecycle to move features from prototype to production.
What does a Software Engineer earn in Washington?
Median $202800 from 326 postings across 28 companies.