Software Engineer II

Azure AI Knowledge is looking for a passionate Software Engineer to join the Azure AI Search backend team. In this role, you will build large-scale, developer-facing cloud services and solve complex engineering problems across search engines, distributed systems, information retrieval, reliability, and performance. You will work in an agile, customer-obsessed environment and contribute to the core systems that index, store, and serve data for demanding search and AI workloads. 

Azure AI Search is a global managed search solution. As the hosted search engine on Azure, we make it quick and easy for developers to integrate a robust set of search capabilities into their applications; Think e-commerce sites, data catalogs, large enterprise applications. Over the last few years, the service has gone through tremendous growth, expanding into new market segments, and enabling new customer scenarios. Currently, we are sitting right in center of the AI wave enabling knowledge retrieval scenarios driving future growth, we’re working to support a broader range of customer workloads in terms of data and query volume, usage patterns, and hosting modes. Independently, we’re investing heavily to improve key drivers of customer satisfaction including search relevance and developer experience.  

 This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to take the next step in their career and be at the forefront of what Microsoft cares about most: Data, Cloud and AI. 

As a team we’re proud of what we build and how we build it. We run lean, obsess about customers and use an evidence-based approach to decision making. Every single week we talk to customers to make sure we build what they want. We leverage open-source technologies, develop in C#, Java and C++, our codebase builds in minutes, and we ship new bits regularly. We hire self-driven engineers ready to take on new challenges, develop ownership, and learn quickly. We reduce the process to a minimum. As an engineer on the team, you’ll spend most of your time writing code, contributing improvements in different dimensions of the service value proposition: core search, manageability, scale, availability, performance, developer experience.

• Lead the design, implementation, testing, and delivery of complex backend capabilities for new search and AI retrieval workloads in Azure, driving technical design and execution through production deployment, operation, and continuous improvement. 

• Drive product and service quality through hands-on DevOps leadership, including monitoring, diagnostics, incident response, root-cause analysis, automation, live-site tooling, and proactive identification and elimination of recurring reliability risks. 

• Engage directly with customers and partner teams to understand complex scenarios, translate feedback into technical requirements, and drive resolution of high-impact issues. 

• Develop deep expertise in Azure provisioning and service management, and use that expertise to influence architecture, operational practices, and engineering decisions across the team. 

• Provide technical leadership for complex, ambiguous projects by defining architecture, identifying risks and dependencies, coordinating execution across teams, and helping other engineers make sound design and implementation decisions. 

Required Qualifications 

• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting and communication skills. 

• Good understanding of systems fundamentals, including operating systems, networking, concurrency, storage, algorithms and data structures, cloud platforms, and distributed systems. 

• Openness to feedback and effectiveness at collaborating with diverse groups of people. 

• Demonstrated independence, bias for action, and tolerance for ambiguity. 

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, developing, testing, and operating production software. 

• Experience developing production software in C#, C++, Java, or another object-oriented programming language; experience with scripting, automation, or SQL is an advantage. 

• Building and shipping production grade cloud services, including designing and implementing solutions for telemetry and monitoring. 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering (or equivalent experience). 

 Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with Lucene, Elasticsearch, Open Search and the full ELK stack is a plus 

• Experience building systems on top of with one of the large cloud platforms is a plus 

• Experience coordinating resources across diverse teams to restore service and maintain SLA’s 

• Ability to conceptualize a distributed service, it’s dependencies and the transactional flow when troubleshooting across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage and distributed services layers.   

• High enthusiasm, integrity, ingenuity, results-orientation, self-motivation, and resourcefulness in a fast-paced environment.  

• Deep desire to work collaboratively, find win/win solutions and celebrate successes  

• Always leading with deep passion and empathy for customers and co-workers. 

AZDAT #ENGGJOBS 

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. 

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via theAccommodation request form.

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 aboutrequesting accommodations.