Principal Data Engineer

Overview

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate engineers to help achieve that mission.

The Azure Data and AI Solutions (ADAS) Team within SCHIE develops advanced analytical and tooling solutions to support and improve the quality of Microsoft Azure. We collect and analyze data across the full Azure stack, HW & SW components, Silicon development processes, and much more. ADAS AI, a branch of ADAS, provides AI, ML solutions and advanced visualizations to cloud engineering and management partners.

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and delivery of scalable data platforms that power custom analytics, AI-driven insights, and advanced visualizations for Azure hardware and cloud engineering scenarios. This high-impact role will focus on modernizing data pipelines and repositories, enabling governed data access, improving data quality and compliance, and partnering closely with BI, AI/ML, Software Engineering, Program Management, and hardware engineering teams to deliver trusted, production-ready data solutions for Azure-level programs.

Responsibilities

Architect and deliver mission-critical data solutions across multiple Azure services, ensuring reliability, scalability, data governance, security compliance, and operational readiness for engineering and management stakeholders.

Design, develop, review, and maintain production-quality code for data engineering services, pipelines, APIs, and automation components, with a focus on performance, testability, observability, maintainability, and secure engineering practices.

Partner with AI/ML engineers, BI developers, software engineers, program managers, and hardware engineering teams to translate business and engineering needs into data models, platform capabilities, dashboards, and actionable insights.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

10+ years development experience, design skills as a data engineer

Desired coding languages include Python, C#, SQL

Hands on experience in Azure Data platform, Azure/Fabric/Kusto Ecosystem

Knowledge on data pipelines, capacity & usage analytics, Azure subscriptions or similar technical infrastructures

Capable of technical deep dives into service design, operating systems, networking and storage

CS Degree or equivalent experience

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

ADO (Azure Dev Ops) management experience

Firm sense of accountability and ownership for end-to-end project lifecycle

Knowledge and working experience in AI, data mining, statistics, mathematics is a plus

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.

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