About the job
Microsoft AI is looking for a Principal Software Engineer - AI Ads, to shape the future of online advertising in Mountain View, CA or Redmond, WA. You’ll lead the design and development of large-scale shopping ads infrastructure that powers billions of products worldwide. This is a rare opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI, big data, and deep learning systems while collaborating with world-class scientists and engineers to deliver solutions at massive scale.
Responsibilities
Lead the design, development, and optimization of large-scale shopping ads infrastructure and algorithms.
Build and maintain the universal product graph spanning billions of products across multiple languages.
Develop scalable systems for data ingestion, storage, retrieval, and real-time serving at global scale.
Apply machine learning (ML), nature language processing (NLP), and deep learning (DL) models to improve ad relevance, personalization, and selection.
Collaborate with scientists and engineers across Microsoft AI to translate research into production systems.
Drive innovation by identifying technical opportunities that align with Microsoft’s Commerce Strategy.
Mentor and guide engineers, fostering technical competence and collaboration across the team.
Qualifications
Minimum
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
4+ years of industrial experience building large scale systems and supporting AI models.
2+ years of experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow), LLMs/SLMs, and AI Agents.
2+ years of experience with cloud services, large-scale big data platforms, and streaming/real-time frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming), and AI infrastructure development.
Preferred
Committed background in computational advertising, recommender systems, or search engines
Demonstrated ability to translate high-level vision into detailed, high-quality design and implementation; skilled at integrating both quantitative and qualitative data into decision-making, and effective in both independent and collaborative settings
Passion for innovation, solving complex problems, and optimizing systems
Committed to learning and adept at adopting and applying the latest AI technologies to day-to-day work
Proficient background in computational advertising, recommender systems, or search engines