Principal Software Engineer - Microsoft Canada, Vancouver

Position summary

Are you interested in building real-time communication technologies that enable voice, video, and AI-powered experiences across Microsoft products? The RTC Client & Core Media team develops foundational Real-Time Communications technologies across mobile, web, desktop, and virtual desktop environments. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help architect and build the next generation of real-time communication technologies, including platforms that support AI-powered and agentic communication experiences. In this role, you will provide technical leadership across complex engineering initiatives involving native mobile and client platforms, real-time communications, developer infrastructure, automation, and AI-assisted engineering.

Who we're looking for

Microsoft Canada careers offer an environment to collaborate across organizational boundaries, define technical direction, and deliver reliable solutions. Required and preferred qualifications for this Vancouver opportunity include:

• Bachelor'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, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud background check.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience or Bachelor's Degree with 12+ years technical engineering experience (preferred).
• Experience designing and developing production software for native mobile or client platforms, including Android, iOS, or Windows.
• Experience architecting and delivering native mobile or desktop SDKs, libraries, or platform components from design through production.
• Experience designing complex software architectures spanning multiple components, platforms, or engineering teams.
• Experience with real-time communications, media, networking, or related high-performance client technologies.
• Experience with software development lifecycle automation, developer infrastructure, or AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Experience improving the reliability, performance, security, maintainability, or operational excellence of production software.
• Experience providing technical leadership through architecture and design reviews, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring.

Responsibilities

As part of Microsoft Canada jobs in Vancouver, your day-to-day responsibilities will encompass technical leadership, software development, and cross-team collaboration across multiple areas:

• Lead the architecture, design, development, and delivery of complex software systems and client platform capabilities supporting real-time communications across mobile, desktop, web, and virtual desktop environments.
• Design and build secure, reliable, diagnosable, maintainable, and reusable native client libraries and SDK capabilities across Windows, iOS, and Android ecosystems.
• Define and drive technical solutions across multiple components and teams, identifying dependencies, evaluating architectural tradeoffs, and building alignment with engineering and partner organizations.
• Develop and improve AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities that support software development activities such as investigation, testing, validation, code review, reliability, and incident response.
• Improve engineering infrastructure, documentation, build and test automation, validation mechanisms, and development workflows to enable reliable and efficient AI-assisted engineering.
• Develop reusable engineering patterns, tools, and capabilities that can be adopted across teams while balancing common platform requirements with domain-specific needs.
• Establish engineering practices and validation mechanisms to evaluate the quality, reliability, security, and effectiveness of AI-assisted or automated engineering workflows, including appropriate human review.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and partner teams to understand requirements, document technical designs, implement features, develop testing strategies, manage feature rollouts, and establish monitoring and telemetry.
• Use telemetry, diagnostics, experimentation, and production data to understand system behavior, evaluate engineering tradeoffs, and identify opportunities to improve performance, reliability, security, and customer experiences.
• Participate in design and code reviews and provide technical leadership and mentoring to engineers across the organization.
• Participate in on-call and site reliability activities, including investigating and responding to live-site issues and identifying engineering improvements that increase reliability and supportability.
• Collaborate across Microsoft with engineering, security, privacy, compliance, and product teams to deliver solutions that meet technical and business requirements.
• Make data-informed technical tradeoffs across competing requirements, balancing short-term needs with longer-term architecture, maintainability, and engineering quality.
• Embody our culture and values.

Compensation and perks

For Software Engineering IC5 positions, the typical base pay range across Canada is CAD $142,400 to CAD $257,500 per year. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer committed to a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.