Principal Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

Microsoft

Confirmed live today High trust

Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type: Hybrid
Location: —
Salary: $142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted: 1 day ago
Freshness: Confirmed live today
Closes: Apr 7, 2027

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $198k

This role $209k

$122k $291k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 67% of similar roles. Most pay $169,550–$226,000 — the blue 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 648 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 624 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

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As a Principal Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure, you will join the Foundry and Inference Training team to build platforms and systems enabling large-scale AI training and inference on Azure. You will design, build, and operate distributed storage systems, file systems, and KV caching architectures specifically for foundation-model pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Your daily work involves optimizing data access, throughput, and latency for GPU-accelerated workloads within large Kubernetes clusters. You will utilize languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python to solve complex problems in storage performance, reliability, and scalability. Key technical areas include distributed systems, high-performance networking like RDMA and InfiniBand, and GPU-accelerated environments. You will also lead architecture reviews and establish engineering practices for secure, high-performance cloud services.

What does a Software Engineer earn?

Median $196750 from 2601 postings across 154 companies.

See salary data

Skills

Distributed Systems Kubernetes C++ Python C# Java Storage Systems File Systems KV Caching RDMA InfiniBand RoCE CUDA GPU Observability Networking Azure Distributed Training

What you'll do

Design and evolve distributed storage systems and file systems for cloud-scale AI training and inference.
Architect storage stacks for large Kubernetes clusters to optimize data access, throughput, and latency for GPU workloads.
Design storage and key-value caching architectures to improve LLM inference performance and cost efficiency.
Improve system durability and availability through automation, observability, diagnostics, and resiliency engineering.
Analyze complex cross-layer production issues to identify root causes and implement durable improvements across storage and networking.
Partner with infrastructure and machine learning teams to deliver end-to-end capabilities for foundation-model training and inference.
Lead architecture reviews, influence long-term storage strategy, and mentor engineers on engineering practices.

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 C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
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 C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, 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 C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python (preferred).
5+ years of experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems, storage systems, file systems, databases, or cloud infrastructure services (preferred).
Experience operating highly available, fault-tolerant services in production environments, including troubleshooting complex distributed-system failures (preferred).
Experience applying storage concepts such as durability, replication, consistency, performance, and reliability to production system design (preferred).
Experience leading technical design reviews or delivering cross-team engineering projects across software, infrastructure, networking, or platform components (preferred).

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