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.
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 (Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Quick UDP Internet Connections (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
- 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.
