Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Microsoft

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About The Position

As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer you will lead curial initiatives in the team responsible for durable, high-quality handling of high severity, customer impacting, incidents across Microsoft M365 Substrate Core services. As our systems continue to expand in scope and complexity, this role ensures incidents are handled consistently, predictably, and with clear ownership, minimizing customer impact while accelerating recovery and organizational learning.
This role combines leadership in the reliability domain, incident command, and operational governance, working in close partnership with Incident Managers (IMs), Service Owners, and executive stakeholders. You will set standards for how Substrate responds to its most severe outages and drive the evolution of incident handling and escalation practices across all production rings and public/sovereign clouds.
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.

Requirements

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 12+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.
• 7+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
• Experience building or scaling incident response programs at organizational or enterprise scope.
• Background in SRE, production engineering, or platform reliability roles.
• Track record of reducing customer impact through improved incident handling, tooling, or prevention.
• Experience operating in follow the sun or globally distributed incident response models.
• Proven experience leading teams through high severity production incidents in large, distributed systems.
• Proficient understanding of incident management, reliability engineering, and live site operations at scale.
• Ability to drive clarity, accountability, and results in ambiguous, time critical situations.

Responsibilities

• Own execution quality for Substrate high severity incidents, ensuring clear command, decisive leadership, and forward momentum during high impact events.
• Act as the senior incident leader or sponsor for long running, high stakes, or cross service incidents, ensuring alignment on impact, risk, and recovery priorities.
• Partner closely with Incident Managers, Subject Matter Experts, and service leaders to ensure effective diagnosis, escalation, and mitigation when ownership is unclear or action is blocked
• Ensure high quality post incident reviews and drive accountability for repair items that reduce recurrence and systemic risk. Ensure consistent application of severity and priority models, outage declaration criteria, and executive escalation paths.
• Coach and help develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers serving as incident responders.
• Build a culture of calm execution, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning during and after incidents.
• Help hire and grow senior talent capable of operating as trusted leaders in high pressure, executive visible situations.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and executives on live site risk, readiness, and incident response maturity.
• Communicate clearly and credibly with senior leadership during customer impacting events.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level