Job Description

Overview

Azure AI Search is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Azure AI Knowledge team, building the knowledge retrieval platform for traditional search and generative AI experiences over enterprise data. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys solving complex problems at the intersection of AI, information retrieval, distributed systems, and large-scale cloud services. You will own significant technical areas from architecture and implementation through deployment, reliability, and customer success; work across team and organizational boundaries; make sound engineering decisions in ambiguous problem spaces; and raise the technical bar for the broader team.

Azure AI Search is a globally distributed managed search service that enables developers to build secure, scalable search, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic AI applications over enterprise data. The service supports a broad range of workloads, usage patterns, and hosting models, while continuously improving search relevance, developer experience, scale, availability, performance, and operational efficiency.

This is an opportunity to shape foundational capabilities in one of Microsoft’s most important areas—Data, Cloud, and AI—while delivering durable customer impact at global scale.

We are a customer-obsessed, data-driven team committed to engineering excellence. We use open-source technologies, build in C#, C++, and Java, and value engineers who collaborate well, learn quickly, and use AI-assisted engineering practices to improve development velocity and quality.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact capabilities for Azure AI Search.
• Own significant technical areas, including architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, reliability, security, and ongoing operations.
• Make architectural and engineering decisions for distributed systems at cloud scale, balancing customer needs, performance, availability, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Identify ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, develop clear technical strategies, and drive execution across engineers and partner teams.
• Build and operate highly available production services, including telemetry, monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and durable corrective actions.
• Engage with customers and partners to understand scenarios, translate requirements into technical solutions, and resolve complex issues.
• Influence engineering investments using service data, customer feedback, and operational insights.
• Mentor engineers, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and raise engineering standards.
• Contribute to an inclusive engineering culture grounded in collaboration, accountability, learning, and customer impact.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field and 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Strong design, coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills in C#, C++, Java, or another object-oriented programming language.
• Experience designing, building, shipping, and operating production-grade cloud services or large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency, networking, storage, performance, and scalability.
• Experience owning complex technical components from design through production operations.
• Ability to work independently, make progress in ambiguous problem spaces, and drive alignment across engineers and teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architectural decisions and trade-offs.
• Experience mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices through design reviews, code reviews, operational reviews, and technical guidance.
• Experience with Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or related search technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with information retrieval, semantic search, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI, or knowledge retrieval systems.
• Experience designing and operating services on Azure or another large-scale cloud platform.
• Experience with service observability, capacity planning, performance optimization, reliability engineering, incident management, and live-site operations.
• Experience coordinating across teams to deliver complex technical initiatives or restore service during critical incidents.
• Ability to reason across application, network, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage, compute, and distributed service layers.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools or agentic engineering workflows to improve software development productivity and quality.
• Strong customer empathy, sound technical judgment, and a track record of delivering durable solutions in a fast-paced environment.

AZDAT #ENGGJOBS

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.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.