Overview

Microsoft Azure powers some of the world’s most mission‑critical cloud services. At this scale, database reliability, performance, and operational excellence are foundational to customer trust. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for the database layer of a first‑party Azure service built on Azure SQL. This role goes beyond traditional DBA responsibilities. You will shape how the service designs, uses, operates, and evolves its databases at scale—partnering closely with software engineers, SREs, and architects to drive durable reliability and performance improvements. Success in this role is measured by service‑level impact, technical influence, and long‑term reliability outcomes, not by task execution alone.

Responsibilities

• Database Reliability, Performance, and Scale Own the availability, durability, and performance of large‑scale Azure SQL databases supporting a production Azure service. Lead deep performance tuning efforts, including query plan analysis, indexing strategies, concurrency control, stored procedure optimization, and workload isolation. Diagnose and resolve complex issues such as deadlocks, blocking, resource contention, latency spikes, memory pressure, and failover behaviors. Define and drive capacity planning models, performance guardrails, and growth readiness strategies.
• Engineering Partnership and Architectural Influence Partner with software engineers and architects to influence how the service uses Azure SQL, including schema design, access patterns, transaction boundaries, and consistency models. Review and guide database‑related design proposals with a focus on long‑term reliability, operability, scalability, and cost efficiency. Advocate for engineering solutions that reduce ongoing operational burden and eliminate repetitive manual work.
• Schema, Configuration, and Data Migrations Lead the design and execution of safe, automated schema changes, configuration updates, and data migrations on live, highly available systems. Establish rollout, validation, and rollback strategies that minimize customer impact and operational risk. Anticipate migration risks and proactively design mitigations before issues surface in production.
• Observability and Proactive Health Define and evolve deep Azure SQL telemetry, including latency, throughput, waits, failures, saturation signals, and early‑warning indicators. Use data to proactively identify reliability risks, performance regressions, and emerging capacity constraints. Partner with SREs to integrate database health signals into service‑level monitoring and reliability models.
• Incident Response and Root Cause Ownership Serve as the database technical authority during live‑site incidents and on‑call rotations. Lead root cause analysis for database‑related outages and reliability events.
• Reliability Fundamentals and Reuse Identify and reduce database technical debt to improve maintainability, predictability, and operational simplicity. Build reusable tooling, automation, and standards that improve database operations across the service. Share best practices, documentation, and learnings to raise the reliability bar beyond your immediate team.

Qualifications

Required 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.

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

• Extensive experience operating and administering Azure SQL in largescale, highly available, production environments.
• Proven expertise in database performance tuning, troubleshooting, and optimization for high‑traffic, mission‑critical systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals as they apply to relational databases, including replication, failover, durability, and consistency.
• Demonstrated experience designing and executing online schema changes and data migrations on live systems.
• Experience providing technical leadership during high‑severity incident response and driving long‑term corrective actions.
• Ability to influence engineers and architects without direct authority and set technical direction across teams.
• Experience with Azure SQL, geo‑replication, failover groups, and high‑availability patterns.
• Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or reliability‑focused engineering roles.
• Track record of building automation and eliminating manual operational work.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping technical strategy across multiple teams.

Salary Information

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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.

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.