Software Engineer II Job at Microsoft Corporation (Multiple Locations)

Job Description

We are seeking a skilled software engineer to join our team and help implement advanced Identity and Access Management standards by leveraging emerging AI-forward technologies. In this role, you will work on complex, high‑impact technical challenges in close collaboration with subject matter experts, engineers, and architects across Substrate, Microsoft 365, E+D, Entra, and Azure. These initiatives offer meaningful opportunities for deep technical growth and long‑term career progression. The ideal candidate is passionate about building scalable, secure solutions for a broad set of customers, including service developers, and consistently delivers high‑quality systems aligned with industry best practices in security and reliability. You bring strong problem‑solving and debugging skills, along with a solid foundation in modern software engineering practices, including SDK and shared component development for hyperscale distributed systems. Success in this role requires a strong sense of system design, a continuous improvement mindset, and an uncompromising focus on quality.

Job Responsibility

AI-Native Development: Improves artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC)
Proactively takes responsibility for the content of their AI-generated requirements, design documents, code, and other assets, assisting other members of the team to do the same
Incorporates Responsible AI practices into the SDLC to ensure appropriate controls over AI-generated assets
Applies SDLC and engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE framework, Engineering System Success Playbook [ESSP]) to guide improvements to processes and practices, especially those involving AI
Experiments with AI tools and practices to improve their own capabilities, and provides recommendations on how to adopt them to other members of the team.
Coding: Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across products that adheres to design specifications
Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs
Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy
Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices
Identifies and anticipates blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalates them, communicates how they will impact timelines, and then leads efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them.
Leads efforts on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions while developing code before issues occur across products in production
Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations
Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, the implementation of repair actions, and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence
Proactively applies least-access principles, uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and drives those practices across the team.
Reviews product code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area
Brings insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills
Conducts code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team
Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered
Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews, providing feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices
Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process.
Design: Owns and leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost)
Leads the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best
Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions
Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members
Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements
Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems
Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions
Leads efforts to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations
Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations
Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others
Leads the refinement of products through data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration
Reviews complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.
Mentors others on and independently creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code
Mentors others on and independently ensures test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases)
Leads adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite
Mentors others on, and builds testable code and considers testability during design for a set of solutions
Understands the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applies them across the architecture as appropriate
Designs and executes plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code for a set of solutions
Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation.
Leads identifying dependencies and incorporating them into the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform
Leads the active identification of other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others
Demonstrates deep understanding of upstream and downstream interactions between systems and ensures security, compliance, performance, and reliability can be achieved across the entire stack
Coordinates and collaborates with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap
Enables communications and negotiates across teams to resolve conflicts around dependency ownership and required work
Drives agreements between dependent teams to align to the delivery schedule.
Engineering Excellence: Applies and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants
Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.
Remains current by investing time and effort into being informed staying abreast of current developments
Proactively seeks new knowledge, evaluating new trends, technical solutions, and patterns, assessing how to adapt them to current problems, and shares knowledge with other engineers
Conducts learning and literary sessions to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge).
Leads efforts to use and enhance, or build, new software developer tools to support easier, faster, and more effective software engineering across products
Identifies whether open source or internal code is available to address coding needs for a set of products, and reuses it in a responsible manner where applicable
Develops substantial skills in tools inside and outside current areas of expertise
Leads identification and/or creation of tools that are useful for building the product
Shares best practices and teaches others about new tools and strategies.
Leads efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams
Creates and assures the presence of visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for products
Develops and maintains a deep understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft
Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are followed and met.
Understands and applies security best practices and establishes code invariants to model "security as code," ensuring each layer is independently secure, and minimizing risk
Supports and/or adopts, and may set security standards for clear security code review practices for a set of products that align with design and engineering principles to raise the security hardening for both protections and detections
Proactively incorporates deployment gates on security controls, and scanners for a set of products to prevent regressions and/or vulnerabilities that would have customer impact
Includes required security monitoring to ensure detection of violations
Collaborates with relevant security partners to define security promises and security invariants for the design of a product/solution while factoring in attacker/investigator personas for security monitoring and telemetry needs, ensure threat models and premortems validate upstream and downstream assumptions and security invariants, establish security breach drills and security incident response processes (e.g., impact analysis, containment), and ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) safety features are implemented for the AI production systems tied to a set of products.
Collaborates with partner teams to ensure a set of products work well with the components of the partner team, ensuring proper end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance, and DRI escalation pathways are established before going live.
Considers and leads the identification of requirements for, and the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible
Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products.
Implement: Leads efforts for experiments that determine the impact of changes using feature flags/flighting in their code, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results
Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value
Drives collaboration efforts with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to ensure incorporation of success and guard rail metrics for experimentation.
Leverages their subject-matter expertise to partner with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) to drive multiple groups' project plans, release plans, and work items
Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap
Guides other members for project estimation and escalates issues that might cause a major delay
Drives efforts to ensure required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning
Drives efforts to ensure project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements
Drives efforts to ensure all code for a set of products/solutions is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents
Calculates capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of products and/or solutions
Makes considerations for efficient operation of a set of products and/or solutions after it is live
Proactively establishes rollback plans for a set of products and/or solutions.
Leads leveraging existing deployment frameworks in the implementation of solutions within the existing framework, automating deployment tasks when possible to ensure efficiency
Proactively follows safe change deployment best practices (e.g., ensuring that flights are set correctly) for their team to minimize adverse impact to users and other services
Optimizes deployments within products and components to meet differing business objectives
Leads efforts to ensure that solutions are deployed safely, rolling out security-sensitive features only to applicable, relevant customers and scenarios to reduce the attack surface
Proactively monitors dependency status and ensures that only the latest, secure versions are deployed
Defines when rollback plans should be enacted for a set of products
Drives building deployment infrastructure to allow developers' private builds for a set of products/solutions to be tested in a production-like environment.
Reliability and Supportability: Integrates, designs, and reviews others' work across a team or product to integrate logging and instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms, and for allowing monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios for both live and A/B experiments for products, services, and offerings
Leverages telemetry feedback and effectiveness to drives the improvement of subsequent monitoring designs
Ensures solutions are scalable, financially responsible, and meet capture/storage guidelines
Leads efforts to classify, and analyze complex data and analyses on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring), and leads the creation of outputs (e.g., notifications, dashboards) that improve monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios, system monitoring and/or issue identification and mitigation
Proactively considers the privacy implications of telemetry code changes, and of adding new data points.
Holds accountability as a designated responsible individual (DRI) and mentors other engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions
Alerts stakeholders as to status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for complex issues
Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues
Coordinates people and resources to ensure DRI responsibilities are covered across teams
Responds within service level agreement (SLA) timeframe
Has line of sight to incidences and plans to address emerging issues
Leads efforts to reduce incident volume, looking globally at incidences and providing broad resolutions
Escalates issues to appropriate owners.
Maintains operations of live site service, following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis
Implements and helps others implement solutions and mitigations to complex issues impacting the performance or functionality of live site services
Reviews and writes incident postmortem and presents insights that drive changes to reduce or eliminate incidents
Proactively improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests, and telemetry to make on-call better, and recommends user-facing support documentation and additional test coverage to reduce likelihood of future user-initiated incidents
Enables secure operations, security monitoring, and integration with live site investigation activities
Proactively identifies opportunities (e.g., lunch talks, automation, practices, tools) that can be leveraged to improve the live site experience and executes on them.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
OR equivalent experience.

Nice to have

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 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 technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
OR equivalent experience.

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Software Engineer II

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