Job Description

The PowerPoint team is embarking on an exciting new chapter - evolving a product with nearly 40 years of history into the future of AI‑powered visual creation and storytelling. As part of Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization to achieve more, we are reimagining how millions of users craft presentations using intelligent, intent‑driven creation experiences. Our charter spans both the trusted PowerPoint ecosystem and next‑generation features built for Copilot and in‑app agents.

With teams in Redmond, WA and Mountain View, CA, we own a rapidly expanding portfolio that includes desktop clients and large‑scale cloud services. This breadth offers unique engineering challenges across scale, performance, efficiency, and reliability. We are pioneering new visual editing capabilities powered by advanced ML systems & Agents - features that generate, transform, and adapt modern presentation artifacts to empower user creativity and productivity.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of complex, scalable AI features ensuring resilience and exceptional user experience.
• Drive technical strategy and architecture decisions across multiple services, influencing partner teams and aligning with compliance and security requirements.
• Champion modern engineering practices, including AI-driven approaches, automation, and cloud-native patterns, across the full development lifecycle.
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering technical excellence and continuous improvement in security, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate cross-org to solve challenging technical problems, streamline processes, and reduce operational costs while improving live-site health.
• Design and implement scalable backend services optimized for machine learning workflows and large language model integration.
• Develop and maintain evaluation-driven systems that leverage text and multimodal inputs (e.g., images) to power visual-creation experiences.
• Build and optimize APIs and infrastructure to support high-performance model inference and experimentation at scale.
• Collaborate with product, ML, and design teams to integrate models into user-facing features, ensuring seamless functionality and performance.
• Conduct model evaluations and experiments, analyze results, and iterate on improvements to enhance accuracy and user experience.
• Monitor and troubleshoot production systems, ensuring reliability, scalability, and compliance with performance benchmarks.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

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 Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in backend service engineering, including work on high-scale infrastructures.
• Proficiency in one or more systems programming languages such as C#, C++.
• 1+ years of experience in software engineering, designing and developing systems (and APIs) that deploy and integrate with AI models.
• 2+ years of experience working with rich telemetry, making data driven decisions, and carrying out rapid experimentation.
• 2+ years of experience building software for scale, performance, and reliability.
• Academic or industry experience with building, finetuning, deploying or building eval-driven systems utilizing the models (any category)
• Leadership skills to influence others, with the ability to understand team dynamics, retain, attract, and develop team members.  
• Grounded in growth mindset, and an advocate for inclusive development.  
• Experience working on the design and implementation of a user-facing product - from fast, evolving new features to long-range infrastructure and architecture investments.
• Customer obsessed and passionate about product impact.  
• Commitment to continuous learning, innovation, and building an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture.
• Currently programming/coding in your current or most recent role.
• Proven experience in building high-scale distributed systems and high-availability services.
• Deep understanding of the AI lifecycle, specifically regarding model inference and system-level optimization.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.