Overview:

Azure AI Search is looking for a Senior Engineer to join our dynamic and innovative team. We seek an individual who is passionate about building large-scale, developer-facing cloud services. In this role, you will tackle complex problems at the intersection of Search, AI, distributed systems, and information retrieval being part of the backend engine team, all within an agile and customer-obsessed environment.

Azure AI Search is a comprehensive, global managed search solution that serves as the hosted search engine on Azure. It provides developers with an easy and efficient way to integrate powerful search capabilities into their applications, whether they are building e-commerce sites, data catalogs, or large enterprise systems.

One of our key missions is to enable super scalable and reliable search capabilities that empower AI agents to efficiently access and process information. By delivering robust solutions tailored for AI-driven scenarios, we ensure that intelligent applications can leverage search at massive scale with consistent performance and dependability.

In recent years, Azure AI Search has experienced significant growth, expanding into new market segments and supporting a broader range of customer scenarios. Positioned at the center of the AI wave, the service is enabling generative AI and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios, which are driving future growth. The team is actively working to support a wider variety of customer workloads, accommodating increasing data and query volume, diverse usage patterns, and multiple hosting modes.

Azure AI Search is also committed to improving key drivers of customer satisfaction, such as search relevance and developer experience. Investments in these areas are ongoing, ensuring that developers and customers receive a high-quality product that meets their evolving needs.

Career Opportunity and Team Values

This position offers an exciting opportunity for individuals seeking to advance their careers and contribute to Microsoft's primary focus areas: Data, Cloud, and AI. The Azure AI Search team takes pride in both the products they build and the methods they use. Operating with a lean approach, the team is dedicated to customer obsession and employs evidence-based decision making. Weekly customer engagements ensure that the team is aligned with real-world needs and priorities.

The team leverages open-source technologies and develops in C#, Java, and C++. With a codebase that builds in minutes and a commitment to shipping new updates regularly, engineers spend most of their time writing code and driving improvements across various aspects of the service, including core search functionality, manageability, scalability, availability, performance, and developer experience.

Engineers on the team are expected to be self-driven, willing to tackle new challenges, take ownership, and learn quickly. Processes are kept to a minimum, enabling team members to focus on impactful work.

For more insight into the team culture, you can read about it in this news article: https://aka.ms/azure-search-startup. Explore the product further on the Azure AI Search product page here and see how developers use search here.

Diversity and Team Support

The Azure AI Search team is comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds and with varied professional and life experiences. The team is committed to maintaining and growing this diversity, believing that it leads to better solutions and a more enjoyable work environment. A people-first approach is fundamental to the team's philosophy for sustainably building and running 24x7 cloud services. Team members support one another, prioritize building things the right way, work reasonable hours, enjoy vacation time, and benefit from paid parental leave.

Responsibilities:

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver new product capabilities to enable new Search workloads in Azure.

• Ensure product and service quality through hands-on DevOps involvement and the development of live site tooling.

• Engage with customers to better understand scenarios and resolve issues.

• Develop expertise in Azure provisioning and service management.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years engineering experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent experience)

• Experience with search technologies (Lucene, Elasticsearch, Open Search, Solr, ELK stack)

• Strong problem-solving and communication skills

• Solid understanding of operating systems, cloud platforms, or distributed systems

• Proficiency in an object-oriented programming language (C#, C++, Java, etc.), knowledge of SQL and automation (PowerShell) is a plus

• Experience building and shipping production-grade cloud services, including telemetry and monitoring

• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in ambiguous situations

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in large-scale cloud platform systems

• Strong debugging and system design skills

• Security-first approach to system design

• Ability to design and implement features end-to-end and coordinate across teams

• Data analysis skills (slice-and-dice, regression, classification)

• Technical leadership and effective communication

Additional Information

Candidates must meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements for this role, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or 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. Microsoft also considers qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require assistance or reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please submit a request via the Accommodation 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 about requesting accommodations.