Principal Site Reliability Engineer Job at Microsoft Corporation (Redmond)

Job Description

Microsoft Substrate is the foundational cloud platform that powers many of Microsoft’s most critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot, providing shared infrastructure, identity, messaging, storage, and service-to-service capabilities used across Microsoft 365 and related cloud offerings. Substrate services operate at global scale and are designed to deliver high availability, reliability, and security for some of the world’s most demanding workloads. As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will set technical and operational direction for reliability across Substrate workloads. You operate at broad scope, influencing architecture, reliability strategy, and engineering practices across teams and organizations. You are expected to lead complex, multi-year initiatives; shape how reliability is designed into systems; and act as a role model for technical excellence, leadership, and Microsoft values—particularly for services operating in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.

Job Responsibility

Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices across Substrate workloads in highly regulated environments
Serve as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer (OCE), participating in on-call rotations and leading incident response for Substrate services in regulated environments
Provide hands-on leadership during the most complex or high-impact incidents, setting technical direction and response strategy
Drive high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable, systemic engineering improvements across teams
Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions
Drive architectural decisions and define software engineering standards that make reliability, security, and compliance intrinsic to Substrate services
Influence service design and engineering decisions across organizational boundaries
Mentor senior and principal engineers and shape the long-term technical direction of the SRE discipline
Represent Substrate SRE perspectives with senior leadership and cross-functional partners

Requirements

Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR equivalent experience
Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements required for this role
This role requires access to Microsoft Government cloud environments, including GCC Moderate (GCCM), GCC High (GCCH), and Department of Defense (DoD) environments
The successful candidate must be able to obtain and maintain the appropriate background investigations and customer screenings required for access to these environments
For access to GCCH and DoD environments, this role requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorably adjudicated Tier 3 (T3) background investigation
For access to GCCM environments, this role requires the ability to meet Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) eligibility requirements
For manager-level roles, a Tier 5 (T5) background investigation is preferred
Candidates may be considered without currently holding these background investigations, provided they are eligible for and able to successfully obtain them
This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter

Nice to have

Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
OR equivalent experience
7+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems
3+ years people management experience
Experience operating or supporting services in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments

Microsoft Corporation - All Job Offers

Select Country

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

Job Responsibility

Requirements

Nice to have

Looking for more opportunities?