Software Engineer II at Microsoft
Mountain View, CA
$102,100–$202,200from the description
Aug 18, 2026
Mountain View, CA
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role focuses on building and maintaining large-scale AI infrastructure services — covering inference, pre-training, and post-training workloads — deployed on Kubernetes clusters across Azure and partner cloud environments. The work spans distributed systems development, GPU capacity tooling, fleet automation, and reliability engineering for state-of-the-art AI models. It suits a software engineer with hands-on experience in systems programming languages and cloud-native infrastructure.
Mid level · 2+ years · Seattle, WA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,300 people in the Seattle, WA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 990–2,050
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $170,959 (middle half $135,720–$216,519). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 20, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The posting lists Go, Rust, Python, C++, and C# as the languages used day-to-day in the role description, but the formal requirements section gates on C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python (or equivalent). Go and Rust are treated as required based on their prominent placement in the role's primary responsibilities.
The degree requirement is a Bachelor's in CS or a related field, but the posting explicitly accepts 'equivalent experience' as an alternative, so no minimum degree is enforced.
NCCL and CUDA are listed as 'knowledge and hands-on experience' items without being placed under a clearly gated requirements heading — treated as preferred.
The IC3 level designation at Microsoft typically corresponds to a mid-level (SDE II) engineer, consistent with the 2+ years experience gates.
A higher base pay range of USD $133,800–$219,200/year applies specifically to the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metro areas; the general US range of $102,100–$202,200/year is captured here.
No specific work location is stated beyond the US-wide and two metro-specific pay ranges; Seattle (Microsoft's headquarters) is used as the CBSA best guess, but the actual location may differ.
Read the full posting
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