Senior Software Engineer

Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact capabilities for Azure AI Search. Own significant technical areas, including architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, observability, reliability, security, and ongoing operations. Make architectural and engineering decisions for distributed systems at cloud scale, balancing customer needs, performance, availability, cost, and long-term maintainability. Identify ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, develop clear technical strategies, and drive execution across engineers and partner teams. Build and operate highly available production services, including telemetry, monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and durable corrective actions. Engage with customers and partners to understand scenarios, translate requirements into technical solutions, and resolve complex issues. Influence engineering investments using service data, customer feedback, and operational insights. Mentor engineers, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and raise engineering standards. Contribute to an inclusive engineering culture grounded in collaboration, accountability, learning, and customer impact. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field and 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent experience. Strong design, coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills in C#, C++, Java, or another object-oriented programming language. Experience designing, building, shipping, and operating production-grade cloud services or large-scale distributed systems. Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency, networking, storage, performance, and scalability. Experience owning complex technical components from design through production operations. Ability to work independently, make progress in ambiguous problem spaces, and drive alignment across engineers and teams. Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architectural decisions and trade-offs. Experience mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices through design reviews, code reviews, operational reviews, and technical guidance. Experience with Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or related search technologies. Experience with information retrieval, semantic search, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI, or knowledge retrieval systems. Experience designing and operating services on Azure or another large-scale cloud platform. Experience with service observability, capacity planning, performance optimization, reliability engineering, incident management, and live-site operations. Experience coordinating across teams to deliver complex technical initiatives or restore service during critical incidents. Ability to reason across application, network, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage, compute, and distributed service layers. Experience using AI-assisted development tools or agentic engineering workflows to improve software development productivity and quality. Strong customer empathy, sound technical judgment, and a track record of delivering durable solutions in a fast-paced environment.