3 days ago
Suzhou, China or Beijing, ChinaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate highly available distributed services on the Microsoft 365 Substrate platform.
- Evolve storage and data-access services, including client SDKs, APIs, migrations, and correctness guarantees for reads, writes, deletes, and queries.
- Build and modernize large-scale ingestion and propagation pipelines with event-driven processing, queueing, prioritization, retries, flow control, and backpressure.
- Improve search freshness and completeness through end-to-end tracing, gap detection, replayable repairs, and backfill mechanisms.
- Drive scale and capacity work across shards and stamps, including scale-out, rebalancing, repartitioning, and avoiding full source-data recrawls.
- Diagnose and mitigate production issues involving throttling, resource pressure, hotspots, regional capacity, and cross-service dependencies.
- Build observability systems using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and data-quality pipelines.
- Improve engineering quality through design reviews, automated and functional testing, safe flighting, rollback, and reduction of test flakiness and toil.
- Apply automation and AI-assisted tooling to incident triage, diagnostics, and routine operations.
- Partner with service teams across regions and time zones on milestones, workload onboarding, and cross-team architecture changes.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft Cloud background-check and applicable Microsoft, customer, or government security-screening requirements.
- Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience for Principal-level work, or equivalent demonstrated impact.
- Strong coding skills in at least one systems or backend language such as C#, C++, Java, Go, or Rust; C# and .NET experience is especially relevant.
- Strong foundations in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, networking, and operating systems.
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems or cloud services, including failure modes, consistency, latency, and throughput.
- Experience designing APIs or SDKs, writing testable code, and building unit, integration, and end-to-end automated tests.
- Experience operating production services, including on-call rotations, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
- Experience building large-scale distributed storage, database, search, or messaging systems, including 8+ years for Principal-level scope.
- Hands-on experience with storage engines, distributed file or object stores, key-value stores, or search engines such as Lucene-based systems.
- Experience operating services at the scale of millions of tenants or billions of items, including multi-region and sovereign-cloud deployments.
- Experience with Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive back ends, Azure Storage, Cosmos DB, or similar platforms.
- Experience leading a major production migration, re-architecture, or modernization without customer-visible disruption.
- Track record of publications, patents, open-source contributions, or internal technical talks in distributed systems or storage.
- Clear written and verbal English communication for technical and leadership audiences.
Benefits
- The position is open for a minimum of 5 days and accepts applications on an ongoing basis until filled.
- Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and provides assistance for religious and disability accommodations during the application process.
About Microsoft
Microsoft develops operating systems, productivity software, cloud services, developer tools, and consumer devices for individuals, enterprises, and governments. Its main products include Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, Visual Studio/GitHub, Xbox, and LinkedIn; revenue comes from software subscriptions and licenses, cloud consumption, hardware sales, and advertising. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is a public company traded on Nasdaq.