Principal Software Engineer, Networking

Microsoft

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Remote

Quick summary

Work type: Remote
Location: Remote
Salary: $142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted: 4 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live yesterday
Closes: Apr 4, 2027

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $203k

This role $209k

$127k $291k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 59% of similar roles. Most pay $174,600–$231,000 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $209k versus about $203k 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 634 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 612 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Software Engineer, Networking

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The Principal Software Engineer - Networking joins the AKS Flex team to build networking for a single control plane managing worker nodes across diverse environments like on-premises data centers, edge sites, and other clouds. You will design multi-site connectivity for AKS and the Unbounded open-source project, ensuring pods behave as one cluster across networks. Key responsibilities include owning the networking architecture, designing encrypted overlays, and integrating high-performance fabrics for GPU and AI workloads. You will utilize technologies including Go, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, and Python, while working with WireGuard, GENEVE, VXLAN, IPIP, BGP, eBPF, InfiniBand, and RDMA. The role solves complex problems in overlay and underlay networking, routing, and dataplane performance to unlock capacity for distributed AI training and data-residency-constrained customers.

What does a Software Engineer earn in Remote?

Median $208800 from 350 postings across 49 companies.

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Skills

Kubernetes Go Rust C C++ Python Linux BGP eBPF WireGuard VXLAN GENEVE InfiniBand RDMA Cilium CI/CD Azure Containers GitHub GitLab

What you'll do

Own the networking architecture and multi-year technical roadmap for AKS Flex and Unbounded.
Lead cross-organization design efforts to align interfaces and tradeoffs across AKS, Azure networking, compute, and identity.
Build multi-site networking using encrypted overlays, tunneling, direct L3 routing, BGP, and eBPF dataplanes.
Design networking for remote nodes to handle high latency, intermittent connectivity, NAT traversal, and secure API communication.
Drive the performance, scale, and reliability of networking dataplanes and control planes across a global fleet.
Integrate high-performance fabrics like InfiniBand and RDMA for distributed AI training and inference.
Participate in production operations and on-call rotations to turn operational learnings into engineering improvements.

What we're looking for

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages like Go, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python (or equivalent experience).
Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages like Go, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python (preferred).
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages like Go, Rust, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python (preferred).
Experience with Linux or similar Unix-like server environments (preferred).
Experience leading the architecture, design, and delivery of large-scale networking or distributed systems (preferred).
Deep understanding of networking across data center, overlay, and high-performance fabrics such as InfiniBand, RDMA, VXLAN, GENEVE, WireGuard, BGP, and eBPF-based dataplanes (preferred).
Deep understanding of the Linux networking stack, including routing, netfilter/nftables, XDP, and kernel networking performance (preferred).
Experience with Containers, Kubernetes, or other cloud-native technologies, including building controllers and CRDs (preferred).
Recognized maintainer or leadership role in Kubernetes, Cilium, or other CNCF or networking open-source projects (preferred).
Experience with CI/CD tools and processes, including GitHub, Azure DevOps, or GitLab (preferred).

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