About the position
Microsoft Azure Storage is one of the world's largest, most distributed cloud storage platforms-already operating at Exascale and rapidly advancing toward Zettascale capacity. Our charter is to deliver secure, durable, and ubiquitously accessible storage with industry-leading performance. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Storage team sits at the forefront of this mission. We own the end-to-end storage stack that powers modern AI workloads-pushing for sub-millisecond latencies and massively higher Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) to meet the explosive demand of Large Language Model (LLM) inference and training. As a Senior Software Engineer - Azure Storage, you will design and build high-performance, scalable systems that form the foundation of AI-first cloud workloads. You'll work across the full stack-from low-latency data paths and distributed storage protocols to performance-tuned compute and metadata services. Your focus will be on unlocking new levels of throughput and efficiency to meet the demands of AI/ML training and inference at scale. This is a highly impactful role with broad visibility, requiring systems thinking, deep technical expertise, and a passion for innovation at the intersection of storage and AI.
Responsibilities
- Architect and implement critical components of the Azure Storage stack (front-end, metadata, data path, caching, replication, durability, observability).
- Drive low-latency and high-throughput designs-profiling hot paths, eliminating bottlenecks, and leveraging hardware offload (Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)/Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)/Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs)) where it matters.
- Lead design reviews, code reviews, and technical deep dives with partner teams across Azure Compute, Networking, and AI infrastructure.
- Own services through their full lifecycle: design → development → testing → deployment → site reliability and live-site response.
- Mentor engineers, influence engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar for performance-critical cloud services.
Requirements
- 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, C++, C#, Java, Python, or Rust OR equivalent experience.
- 4+ years of software development experience building scalable, distributed services with C++.
- 3+ years of experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements.
Nice-to-haves
- 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, C++, C#, Java, Python or Rust OR 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, Python or Rust OR equivalent experience.
- Proficient systems-level coding skills in C, C++ or Rust.
- Demonstrated experience in one or more of the following domains: High-performance distributed storage or databases, Hardware acceleration, SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), and advanced instruction sets to optimize compute and I/O paths, Kernel-mode or user-mode networking stacks (TCP, QUIC, RDMA), Low-latency Input/Output (IO), lock-free or wait-free algorithms, fine-grained performance tuning.
- Proven ability to debug complex issues in production environments and drive them to resolution.
Benefits
- Base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year.
- Base pay range for this role in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.
