Microsoft Substrate is the foundational cloud platform that powers many of Microsoft’s most critical services including Exchange Online and M365 Copilot, providing shared infrastructure, identity, messaging, storage, and service-to-service capabilities used across Microsoft 365 and related cloud offerings. Substrate services operate at global scale and are designed to deliver high availability, reliability, and security for some of the world’s most demanding workloads.

As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will set technical and operational direction for reliability across Substrate workloads. You operate at broad scope, influencing architecture, reliability strategy, and engineering practices across teams and organizations.

You are expected to lead complex, multi-year initiatives; shape how reliability is designed into systems; and act as a role model for technical excellence, leadership, and Microsoft values—particularly for services operating in regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments.

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.

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  Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices across Substrate workloads in highly regulated environments

• Serve as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer (OCE), participating in on-call rotations and leading incident response for Substrate services in regulated environments.

• Provide hands-on leadership during the most complex or high-impact incidents, setting technical direction and response strategy.

• Drive high-quality post-incident reviews that result in durable, systemic engineering improvements across teams.

• Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions.

• Drive architectural decisions and define software engineering standards that make reliability, security, and compliance intrinsic to Substrate services.

• Influence service design and engineering decisions across organizational boundaries.

• Mentor senior and principal engineers and shape the long-term technical direction of the SRE discipline.

• Represent Substrate SRE perspectives with senior leadership and cross-functional partners.

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements: