Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft
Microsoft Advertising (MSA) empowers the world’s largest advertisers to reach their maximum potential through digital monetization solutions. Microsoft Monetize is a strategic selling platform that provides holistic inventory management controls and differentiated buyer demand, enabling sellers to unlock full value of their inventory. Microsoft Monetize offers comprehensive analytics and data solutions at a petabyte scale to help maximize value.
The Monetize Inventory Quality team is responsible for a sub system which performs automated quality control of billions of ad requests flowing through the Monetize platform. The annotation and various checks in place assist in maintaining quality of supply, eligibility of ad requests, fraud prevention, etc.
The Monetize Inventory Quality team is looking for a Principal Engineer to help drive, scale, and integrate the inventory management and quality platform with other larger systems. The role requires technical prowess to quickly learn a multitude of technologies. The engineer will work on-site, in Microsoft’s Bangalore/Hyderabad/Noida office, in close collaboration with the engineers around the globe.
Responsibilities
You will be part of an engineering team responsible for the architecture, development, administration, and maintenance of the inventory quality platform. The platform is critical for our client's success, and you'll play a key role in modernizing the platform to be able to handle constantly emerging quality challenges collaborating with product and engineering teams across Microsoft.
Key Responsibilities
Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for large-scale, high‑throughput, low‑latency advertising platforms, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, privacy compliance, and cost efficiency.
Lead critical design decisions, resolve ambiguous technical problems, and guide teams on best practices in distributed systems, performance optimization, and reliability engineering
Hands-on, contributing to core code, complex implementations, and production issue resolution.
Influence and align multiple engineering teams, partner organizations, and external dependencies through strong technical leadership, clear architectural direction, and data‑driven decision making.
Partner with Product Management and leadership to translate business goals into robust technical solutions.
Mentor engineers raise the technical bar and promote a culture of engineering excellence.
Drive operational excellence through improved observability, reliability, and DevOps practices.
Demonstrated ability to scale architecture and teams concurrently while maintaining engineering excellence and delivery velocity.
Qualifications
Qualifications Required:
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of large-scale systems.
Proven experience designing and operating distributed, cloud-based systems at scale.
Strong expertise in system architecture, data structures, algorithms, and software design patterns.
Hands-on experience with modern programming languages (e.g., C#, Java, C++, Python, Go).
Experience with cloud platforms, microservices, data pipelines, or large data systems.
Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across multiple teams.
Preferred Qualification:
Experience with AdTech or Monetization platforms, including ad serving, auction systems, inventory management, or measurement/reporting systems.
Experience building high-throughput, low-latency, or mission-critical services.
Deep knowledge of Azure or other hyperscale cloud platforms.
Experience with data-intensive systems, machine learning platforms, or large marketplaces.
Track record of leading major architectural initiatives or platform transformations.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including technical design documentation.
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.