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Principal Software Engineer - Performance

United States, Mountain View 139900.00 - 274800.00 USD / Year · Job Posted March 22, 2026
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Job Description

The Artificial Intelligence Cloud Inference team at Microsoft develops AI software that enables running AI models everywhere, from world’s fastest AI supercomputers, to servers, desktops, mobile phones, IoT devices and internet browsers. We collaborate with our hardware teams and partners, both internal and external, and operate at the intersection of AI algorithmic innovation, purpose-built AI hardware, systems, and software. We are a team of highly capable and motivated people that pride themselves on a collaborative and inclusive culture. We own inference performance of OpenAI and other state of the art LLM models and work directly with OpenAI on the models hosted on the Azure OpenAI service serving some of the largest workloads on the planet with trillions of inferences per day in major Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Bing, SQL Server, and Dynamics. As a Principal Software Engineer - Performance on the team, you will have the opportunity to work on multiple levels of the AI software stack, including the fundamental abstractions, programming models, runtimes, libraries and APIs to enable large scale training and inferencing of models. You will benchmark OpenAI and other LLM models for performance on GPUs and Microsoft HW, debug and optimize performance at all levels of abstraction including kernel, model, algorithm and system level, monitor performance and drive efficiencies that contribute to achieving Microsoft Azure's capex goals. This is a hands-on technical role requiring software design and development skills. We’re looking for someone who has a demonstrated history of solving technical problems and is motivated to tackle the hardest problems in building a full end-to-end AI stack. An entrepreneurial approach and ability to take initiative and move fast are essential.

Job Responsibility

  • Identify and drive improvements to end-to-end inference performance of OpenAI and other state of the art LLMs
  • Measure, benchmark performance on Nvidia/AMD GPU's and first party Microsoft silicon
  • Optimize and monitor performance of LLMs and build SW tooling to enable insights into performance opportunities ranging from the model level to the systems and silicon level, help reduce the footprint of the computing fleet and achieve Azure AI capex goals
  • Enable fast time to market of LLMs/models and their deployments at scale by building SW tools that afford velocity in porting models on new Nvidia, AMD GPUs and Maia silicon
  • Design, implement, and test functions or components for our AI/DNN/LLM frameworks and tools
  • Speeding up/reducing complexity of key components/pipelines to improve performance and/or efficiency of our systems
  • Communicate and collaborate with our partners both internal and external
  • Embody Microsoft's Culture and Values

Requirements

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check:This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice to have

  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
  • 4+ years’ practical experience working on high performance applications and performance debug and optimization on CPU's/GPU's
  • Technical background and solid foundation in software engineering principles, computer architecture, GPU architecture, HW neural net acceleration
  • Experience in end-to-end performance analysis and optimization of state of the art LLMs, HPC applications including proficiency using GPU profiling tools
  • Experience in DNN/LLM inference and experience in one or more DL frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, or ONNX Runtime and familiarity with CUDA, ROCm, Triton.

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