Software Engineer II

Overview

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging & real-time analytics, and business intelligence. The products our portfolio include Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a data culture.

Within Azure Data, the databases team builds and maintains Microsoft’s operational Database systems. We store and manage data in a structured way to enable multitude of applications across various industries. We are on a journey to enable developer friendly, mission-critical, AI enabled operational Databases across relational, non-relational and OSS offerings.

The Azure HorizonDB team is building a next-generation, cloud-native database platform designed for high performance, strong consistency, and seamless scalability. HorizonDB powers mission-critical applications with sub-millisecond latency, always-on availability, and deep alignment with modern, AI-driven workloads.

We are rethinking core database systems from the ground up, including storage, transaction processing, replication, and distributed systems infrastructure, to meet the demands of large-scale cloud services. The work spans low-level systems design through distributed coordination at global scale, with a strong emphasis on reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

We are hiring a Software Development Engineer II to join the HorizonDB team. In this role, you will work on core components of a large-scale distributed database system such as storage engines, transaction processing, replication, failover, and performance optimization. You will collaborate across teams to design and build systems that deliver high reliability, strong consistency, and predictable performance at scale.

This is an opportunity to contribute to foundational platform capabilities, influence the direction of a new database system, and have direct impact on how customers build and run critical workloads in Azure.

We do not just value differences or different perspectives. We seek them out and bring them in so we can benefit from the collective strength of our teams. This helps us build better products and serve our customers more effectively.

Responsibilities

• Work with senior engineers to create highly scalable, performant and maintainable code that can power the next generation of storage layer for planet scale databases.
• Participate in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Consider diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understand when code is ready to be shared or delivered.
• Help Identify performance and scalability issues.
• Maintain operations of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis. ​

Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications
•    Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. 
•    2+ years of experience building and supporting distributed cloud services with production grade.

Job Requirements: Other & Additional
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.
Preferred/Additional Qualifications
•    Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 3+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not li…