Principal Software Engineer-CoreAI

Overview

If you’re excited by the challenge of shaping the future of AI, the AI Platform organization at Microsoft CoreAI offers you the chance to make a real impact. As part of the Azure AI Foundry Customization team, you’ll help build the cutting-edge platform that powers Azure’s innovation—and all of Microsoft’s flagship products, from GitHub and Microsoft 365 to Xbox. Our mission is simple but ambitious: to empower every AI application on the planet.

Here, you’ll work at the heart of a deeply technical environment, designing systems that enable AI to learn, improve, and scale in production. You’ll tackle some of the toughest industry challenges — making frontier models not just powerful, but also accessible, efficient, and cost-effective for enterprises everywhere. By developing pre-training, mid-training, and post-training solutions, you’ll help organizations build AI systems that continuously learn and adapt, using the models most relevant to their workloads.

This role gives you end-to-end ownership and exposure, from high-level APIs to granular reinforcement learning controls, and from Azure ML flexibility to deploying LoRA models and inferencing at scale. You’ll deliver services, pipelines, ML recipes, evaluations, and integrations—supported by Azure’s world-class data centers and GPU infrastructure. With innovations like single-click training data generation, dynamic model routing, and a global partner ecosystem, you’ll help close the loop between deployment and learning, unlocking massive improvements in cost, speed, and reliability.

Join us and you’ll have the opportunity to showcase your work on platforms like Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite, where we highlight breakthroughs in industry-leading innovation, like these (from June 2026):

• Deploy. Observe. Learn. Reinforcement learning for production agents
• Turn foundation models into production AI on Microsoft Foundry
• Post-Training and Deploying Open Source Reasoning Models in Foundry
• Smaller, faster, smarter: Distilling models with fine‑tuning
• Microsoft Build opening keynote for all the exciting innovation @ Microsoft

If you’re ready to shape the future and make agentic AI economically viable for every enterprise, this is where your journey begins

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

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 cod…