We are looking for a Principal Architect who is passionate about distributed storage, more specifically in the area of Index Management for distributed systems. The Azure Storage Index Management engine powers all of our storage services, runs on hundreds of thousands of servers, and indexes data at exabyte scale while serving hundreds of millions of requests per seconds at low latency. We have an innovative Index Management engine which has big opportunities ahead that will majorly disrupt this technology space in differentiated ways. These opportunities are multi-faceted with feature areas such as Blob Index that provides secondary indexing over Object Storage as well as Scale, Performance, and COGS improvements where a single change often results in many millions of dollars of impact on top of delighting customers. We need an Architect in the area of Index Management to make these opportunities a reality. 

To be successful in this role, you must thrive while solving challenges related to durability, availability and concurrency in a very large-scale distributed system. You must be willing to solve challenging technical problems in a space where innovation is always happening. You will have an opportunity to make high impact changes daily. While this is an Architect role, we are looking for someone who can take on challenging development work to help kickstart projects, run complex proof-of-concepts, and technically lead from the front. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of professional software development experience 
• 5+ years of software development experience building scalable, distributed services 
• 5+ years of software development experience with C++ 
• Minimum of a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Design, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent alternative education, skills, and/or practical experience

An ideal candidate would also bring:

• MS/PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering 
• A passion for distributed systems and large-scale storage 
• Experience with distributed databases, transaction semantics/management, and indexing systems 
• Experience with multi-threaded/parallel programming 
• Excellence in software engineering practices, coding and solid foundation in data structures, algorithms with strong testing, debugging and analytical skills 
• Proven ability to plan, schedule and deliver quality software 
• Excellent collaboration skills 
• Passion for customers 

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 the Accommodation request form. 

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.