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 deliver trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate, high-energy engineers to help achieve that mission. 

We in SCHIE’s Firmware Center of Excellence create the foundational firmware that powers the Microsoft Cloud. Our firmware lights up millions of servers and racks across the globe, enabling users to do everything from running blogs to crunching through powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. We’re a growing team of diverse, talented & passionate engineers inventing and delivering technology to light up the “world’s computer!” We are working on the next generation hardware/firmware for server, silicon and rack infrastructure with a focus on innovation in firmware technology to secure Azure infrastructure for Microsoft and their customers. We believe that a robust firmware infrastructure leads to incredibly powerful computing experiences—if you believe this too, we need you! 

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. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

Contribute to all phases of Software design, architecture, development, validation, deployment and support.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams including hardware engineers, software developers, validation & integration, and product managers to define firmware requirements and specifications.

Develop and maintain firmware architecture, ensuring scalability, modularity, and maintainability.

Ensures compliance with security, threat model, privacy, safety, and accessibility standards, leverages developer tools for code creation and debugging, contributes to automation in production and deployment, and proactively seeks knowledge to improve product availability, reliability, efficiency, and performance at scale.

Evaluates AI technologies (such as LLMs, SLMs, embeddings) and architectures (such as orchestration patterns, RAG, etc) when developing solutions. Specifies or implements AI platform improvements like fine-tuning or training custom ML models.

Collaborate with a variety of stakeholders hardware engineering, electrical engineering, firmware engineering, system architects, program management, external partners etc. to create delightful and robust software solutions.

You will solve problems relating to mission-critical services and build automation to prevent problem recurrence.

Stay up-to-date with industry trends and advancements in firmware technologies, and provide recommendations for improvement.

Contribute to product vision and roadmap by bringing innovation to server manageability ecosystem.

Perform system-level debugging and troubleshooting to identify and resolve hardware/firmware-related issues.

Design and implement firmware modules to support various hardware interfaces, including USB, SPI, I2C, I3C, PCIe, and other related protocols.

Define & measure the success/impact of requested analytics & reporting features via quantitative measures.

Contributes to data analysis and feedback integration for product engineering decisions, acting as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) for monitoring and restoring system functionality within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe. Participates in live service operations, and supports telemetry data integration for system behavior insights, with a focus on performance, reliability, and safety.

Supports the identification of dependencies and design documentation for product features, learns about system interactions and back-end dependencies, and contributes to architectural processes under guidance.

Produces code to test hypotheses for technical solutions and assist with technical validation efforts. Collaborates on quality assurance plans, augments test cases, and integrates automation into testing, while understanding the implications of security and compliance in system architecture.

Understands and applies Microsoft’s responsible AI practices to ensure systems meet our commitments to our customers.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications 

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
- OR equivalent experience.

Other Qualifications:

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 5+ year(s) technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

- OR Master's Degree (or currently pursuing a degree) in Computer Science or related technical field with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.

Experience in object-oriented programming, SDE Fundamentals, programming. Professional experience in architecting, designing and developing firmware/software solutions.

Demonstrated interest in/experience with AI/ML technologies.

Experience with Azure Data Explorer (Kusto) and Kusto Query Language (KQL) for querying, analyzing, and visualizing large datasets.

Experience with Platform initialization, Board support package integration, low level drivers for peripherals such as PCIe, I2C, eMMC, SPI, USB, UARTs as well as Memory Management, Scheduling, Interrupts and multi-threading.

Experience with Architecting, Designing and delivering on new Data Center class technologies across the entire platform.

Hands-on experience building and automating CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps using YAML for multi-environment deployments.

Experience in Windows and Linux Operating Systems.

Software Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 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.

Software Engineer II