Principal Architect
Microsoft
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US · Posted November 11, 2026
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About the job
Overview
Every purchase, subscription, renewal, and payment Microsoft makes possible runs through Commerce Engineering. The systems this organization builds carry enormous transaction volume for customers, partners, and sellers across every Microsoft business, and the architectural choices made here shape how quickly the company can bring new offers and business models to market.
As a Principal Architect in Commerce Engineering, you will own the overall system architecture for deeply complex and often ambiguous commerce products, exploring design options, making the call on which direction is best, and ensuring the result meets performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, and cost expectations. You will partner with engineering leaders, technical program managers, and product managers across teams to align dependencies and delivery, and you will stay hands-on, writing and reviewing code and leading by example on engineering quality, security, and live-site excellence. This opportunity will allow you to shape architecture at enterprise scale, deepen your commerce and business acumen, and grow the technical depth of engineers across the organization.
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.
Responsibilities
Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for one or more complex commerce scenarios.
Provides technical leadership for the identification of dependencies and the development of architecture and design documents for commerce products, applications, services, or platforms.
Leads by example and mentors others to produce extensible and maintainable code used across the company.
Leverages deep subject-matter expertise of cross-product features with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to lead multiple product's project plans, release plans, and work items.
Holds accountability as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentoring engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions.
Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale and shares knowledge with other engineers.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
Other Requirements
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
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Experience architecting large-scale, high-availability distributed cloud services, ideally in commerce, billing, payments, or another high-volume transactional domain.
Ability to set technical direction across multiple teams and organizations and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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 about requesting accommodations.