Backend Engineer II

Microsoft · Washington · $102,100–$202,200 (stated in the posting)

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The Backend Engineer II role independently applies appropriate artificial intelligence tools and best practices throughout the software development lifecycle. The engineer collaborates with internal stakeholders to understand customer and user requirements for a set of features. They create clear and effective test strategies to ensure solution quality and execute thorough test plans.

The role involves writing extensible and maintainable code for backend services to minimize defects, reviewing code to assure proper test coverage and adherence to team standards, and implementing debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to validate assumptions. Aim to automate production deployments targeting zero-touch processes when possible. The engineer applies and reviews coding patterns, security risks, and compliance issues to achieve security hardening across product features.

This role is in the Messaging Platform team that supports the backend services serving hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer users across Teams and Copilot.

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.

AI-native development

• Uses AI tools and practices across the software development lifecycle in a disciplined way, from design and coding through testing, code review and incident investigation. Takes responsibility for every AI-generated change: reviews it fully and applies the right tooling and processes with minimal guidance.

Coding

• Writes, and reuses where it makes sense, extensible, maintainable code for messaging services and features with minimal supervision. Considers how easy it is to diagnose, how reliable it is and how well it handles concurrency, ordering and idempotency, with few defects. Knows when code is ready to ship.

• Uses debugging, tests, logs and telemetry to check assumptions before issues reach production. Runs incident retrospectives to find root causes, puts repair items in place and prevents recurrence, using least-access principles and protecting privacy throughout.

• Reviews product and test code promptly for correctness, test coverage, security risks, compliance issues and maintainability. Uses automated code analysis tools and coaches peers through useful review feedback.

Design

• Reviews and comments on architecture proposals for globally distributed messaging systems, such as ingestion, fan-out, storage, sync and notification, with technical leadership from others. Explores design options and lays out the trade-offs of each, and owns some design decisions.

• Helps make sure designs meet requirements for performance, scalability, resiliency and cost of goods sold (COGS) at the scale of billions of messages a day. Upholds Microsoft security, privacy and compliance standards.

• Contributes to design documents. Identifies dependencies and downstream interactions across the platform (storage, identity, Substrate, Teams and Copilot clients and services) and works with partner teams where dependencies and validation overlap.

• Creates clear test strategies that prevent regressions. Runs test plans that include security testing, including negative cases, with minimal supervision. Designs for testability and uses AI tools for test automation.

Engineering excellence

• Contributes to deployment automation for complex messaging features, aiming for zero-touch deployment. Validates code in non-production and production-like environments.

• Applies security best practices and "security as code" invariants. Contributes to security review standards, security deployment gates and scanners, and security monitoring. Works with security partners on threat models, premortems, breach drills and incident response, and makes sure AI safety features are in place for AI-powered capabilities.

• Works with partner teams before go-live so end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance and DRI escalation paths are in place.

• Follows the processes for security, privacy, safety and accessibility. Checks for visible evidence of compliance, such as audit trails, and keeps up with global and local regulations that affect messaging data, such as retention, eDiscovery, data residency and sovereign clouds.

• Applies well-established and secure design practices to build services that scale to customer demand and meet performance expectations and security commitments.

• Stays current on ways to improve availability, reliability, efficiency and observability at scale. Shares knowledge through learning sessions, flags engineering tool gaps, and reuses open-source or internal code responsibly.

Implement

• Works with TPMs and stakeholders to review work items, carry out project and release plans, break large work into estimated pieces and raise issues that could cause delays. Makes sure security, privacy and compliance protections are accounted for in planning.

• Makes sure all code is flighted (released behind feature flags) so production incidents can be mitigated quickly. Calculates capacity with failover, backup and restore, and disaster recovery in mind, plans for efficient operation after launch, and contributes to rollback plans.

• Follows safe deployment practices across rings and regions with managerial guidance. Monitors dependency versions so only the latest secure versions are deployed, and contributes to infrastructure that lets developers test private builds in production-like environments.

• Runs experiments with feature flags and flighting. Works with Data Science and PM to define success and guardrail metrics.

Reliability and supportability

• Contributes logging, instrumentation and telemetry on performance, reliability, availability, usage and safety. Builds dashboards and alerts that improve issue detection and security investigation, and considers the privacy impact of every telemetry change.

• Keeps the live service running during on-call rotations. Mitigates issues quickly and securely with the minimum required permissions, and escalates appropriately. Improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests and telemetry to make on-call better.

• Acts as DRI (designated responsible individual). Monitors for degradation, downtime or interruptions, responds within the service-level agreement (SLA), keeps stakeholders informed and escalates to the right owners.

Understand user requirements

• Works with PM, privacy and security experts, and tech leads to understand customer requirements. Brings customer insights and continuous feedback loops into designs and fixes, using quantitative signals (usage, performance) and qualitative ones (accessibility, globalization), and speaks up for customers' security and privacy needs.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to C#, or Java
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 3+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to C# or Java
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 5+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to C# or Java
  • OR equivalent experience.

Software Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $102,100 - $202,200 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 $133,800 - $219,200 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.

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