Principal Server Performance Architect - Microsoft Azure

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Join us as we scale Azure to new heights! We’re building innovative systems to enhance the performance and efficiency of the millions of server nodes that power Microsoft Azure. You’ll be part of a collaborative and supportive team focused on understanding how hardware and software components work together to shape our Azure virtual machine (VM) products. Our work spans fleet performance optimization, benchmark construction, competitive analysis, customer engagement, platform design influence, and AI-driven performance insights.

As a Principal Server Performance Architect in this role, you will anticipate, locate, and solve virtual machine performance issues. You will find opportunities for improvement through internal testing as well as by working directly with Azure customers to understand their use cases. You will collaborate with Microsoft internal teams, the open-source community, and hardware vendors to deliver performance optimizations that benefit Azure customers. This opportunity will allow you to get deep into virtualized cloud performance plus help shape emerging usage models like bare metal instances. Your experience with server performance will allow you to guide others, multiplying your impact. Our team is based in Redmond, WA. This is a hybrid work opportunity, and you have the option to work remotely.

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.

Required Qualifications (RQs)

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years software or hardware industry experience
  • OR Master's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 6+ years software or hardware industry experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years technical experience in hardware system performance engineering/optimization.

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 (PQs)

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 12+ years software or hardware industry experience
  • OR Master's Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years software or hardware industry experience
  • OR Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field AND 6+ years of software or hardware industry experience
  • OR equivalent experience or capabilities
• 5+ years of experience in system performance areas:
  • Performance monitoring tools and analysis methods, such as Intel V-Tune or Linux perf.
  • Performance-related computer architecture concepts, including page translation, caching, I/O subsystems, memory subsystems, virtualization, NUMA optimizations, voltage/frequency scaling, and power states.
  • System software performance tuning, including compiler optimizations, operating system scheduling, hypervisors, memory management, and BIOS configurations.
  • Benchmarking using industry standard and purpose-built workloads, including SPEC suites, TPC components, Redis, NGINX, and similar workloads.
• 5+ years of experience in diverse software environments and programming languages:
  • Operating systems, including Windows and Linux.
  • Programming languages, including as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and Python.
  • Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs), including x86 and Arm.
• 2+ years of experience in customer-facing technical engagements:
  • Collaborating directly with customers to understand requirements, troubleshoot issues, and deliver tailored solutions.

Software Quality 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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until August 21, 2025.

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• Identify experiments, tools, and methodology to test various scenarios to triage performance improvement opportunities.
• Work with customers to understand performance requirements and configure performance measurements.
• Drive performance improvements to resolution through partnership with other teams and vendors.
• Clearly communicate the status of investigations, resolutions, and next steps or blockers.
• Contribute to requirement documents for hardware vendors and software partner teams.
• Guide other engineers working on performance tests, investigations, and analysis methods.