Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Overview
Substrate powers Microsoft 365. Keeping it up, resilient, and continuously improving is core to our mission. The Incident Response SRE team ensures service resilience by preventing outages, accelerating incident resolution, and driving systemic improvements across Substate and MSAI. The team plays a critical role in enabling effective and efficient management of service health for these global scale services. As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer in the Foundation Incident Response team, you will leverage your passion for live site and combine your software engineering with systems engineering knowledge to prevent outages, respond rapidly when they occur, drive learnings, and engineer solutions that eliminate repeat failures. You’ll partner across Substrate and MSAI to raise the reliability bar through data‑driven practices, automation, and blameless retrospectives that translate into durable fixes. 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.
Responsibilities
Incident management excellence: Lead high-severity incident response, debug complex issues, drive incidents to resolution with clear communication and ownership. Ensure high-quality postmortems reports are created and enforce repair-item SLAs. Improve observability: Enhance telemetry, alerting, and dashboards using One Microsoft tooling to provide actionable insights and reduce detection time. Define and measure reliability: Partner with engineering teams to establish and track SLIs/SLOs for critical scenarios. Live site health reviews: Lead and facilitate live site health review meetings, translating business requirements into metrics and action. Engineering for prevention: Translate learnings into proactive tests, product fixes, rollout guardrails, and automation that reduce risk and improve service health. Reliability drills: Design and execute drills to simulate product failures, validate resilience and recovery, and develop resilience strategies. Define Policy: Draft process and policy documentation for how the organization prepares for, responds to, and prevents incidents.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications: 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. Preferred Qualifications: 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. Site Reliability Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay 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.