Overview

The Budget Optimization Engineering team at Microsoft builds the real-time data infrastructure that powers programmatic advertising at global scale. The team owns Java-based microservices handling budget distribution, campaign discovery and ranking, bid-price optimization, Kafka-based streaming pipelines, and job orchestration — across datacenters.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join this team and drive a significant Azure migration: moving services from legacy infrastructure (Concourse CI, internal Artifactory, Maestro) to modern Azure tooling (Azure DevOps, ACR, AKS). This role spans infrastructure engineering and service development, and requires deep Kubernetes expertise to design and ship production-grade deployments.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

• Responsibilities- Service Development Design and build highly scalable backend services and data pipelines that support privacy-preserving measurement and analytics scenarios using Java, Python (and C# where applicable).
• Maintain and improve production services across the optimization platform — including Kafka streaming pipelines, budget controllers, job orchestration (job-broker), and deal monitoring — with a focus on reliability and strict SLA adherence.
• Drive integrations with external data and measurement partners, designing stable interfaces, schema governance patterns, and robust validation pipelines.
• Work closely with PMs, data science, privacy, and security teams to translate measurement needs into scalable platform capabilities.
• Contribute to the full service lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, code review, and deployment.
• Improve reliability and observability of Kafka consumer/producer pipelines (offset management, retry strategies, delivery guarantees) across cross-datacenter replication flows.
• Infrastructure & Cloud Design and implement Kubernetes/Helm deployments for services currently running on legacy orchestration (Maestro, SAND instances, bare Docker), targeting Azure-native cloud infrastructure.
• Integrate application telemetry (Prometheus/Dropwizard Metrics) with Azure Application Insights and Azure Log Analytics to support production observability and SLA monitoring.
• Apply practical experience with Azure services — including AKS, ACR, and Azure Key Vault — to support secure, cloud-native deployments.
• Collaboration & Standards Lead initiatives to make delivery of high-quality software routine and efficient across the full SDLC, from inception and technical design through testing and production operations.
• Participate in architecture discussions and enforce engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship of junior engineers.
• Contribute to runbooks, deployment documentation, and oncall readiness.
• Leverage AI dev tools across the software development lifecycle to raise team-wide engineering productivity.

Qualifications:

Required:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C#, Java, Go, or PythonOR 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.

Preferred:

• Master'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#, Java, Go, or PythonOR 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#, Java, Go, or Python
• OR equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of technical experience in software development, service engineering, or systems engineering.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, backend services, or data platforms with strict SLA requirements.
• Apache Kafka — solid understanding of consumers, producers, offset management, partition strategies, performance tuning, and cross-datacenter replication patterns.
• Kubernetes — production experience writing and deploying Helm charts; hands-on with Deployments, Stateful Sets, Services, Config Maps, Secrets, Jobs, and HPAs; comfortable with multi-cluster and multi-datacenter environments.
• Cloud infrastructure — practical experience with Azure (AKS, ACR, Azure Key Vault, Azure Application Insights, Azure Log Analytics); familiarity with Azure DevOps or equivalent CI/CD platforms.
• Large-scale data processing — experience with Spark, SQL-based pipelines, or equivalent frameworks for high-throughput event streaming and analytics.
• Distributed systems — understanding of cross-datacenter replication patterns, consistency trade-offs, and fault-tolerant service design.
• Background in advertising, marketing technology, attribution, real-time bidding, programmatic advertising, or large-scale analytics.
• Experience integrating third-party vendor/partner platforms, identity systems, or data collaboration technologies.
• Solid problem-solving skills with a focus on reliability, observability, and system design.

#MicrosoftAI

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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.