Principal Software Engineer - AI Experiences, Copilot at Microsoft
Mountain View, CA
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Aug 18, 2026
Mountain View, CA
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A backend software engineering role focused on designing and shipping APIs that power Copilot-branded applications. The work spans scalable cloud services, distributed systems, and AI platform integrations, requiring hands-on coding across the full backend stack — from data stores and streaming protocols to mobile API contracts. Well-suited to engineers with solid API and cloud infrastructure experience who want to work at the intersection of AI and product development.
Mid level · 4+ years
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
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 (7)
The degree requirement is a Bachelor's in CS or related field, but the posting explicitly accepts 'equivalent experience' as an alternative, so no hard degree gate is set.
The 4+ years of experience requirement is stated at the role level (technical engineering experience with coding) and also repeated for specific skill areas (APIs, cloud, distributed systems); the overall years minimum is set to 4 as the baseline role-level gate.
Programming languages (C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python) are listed as interchangeable options within a single requirement; C is used as the primary with the others as alternatives.
AI platforms/frameworks/APIs appear without firm gating language ('experience working with') and are listed separately from the hard-required blocks, so they are marked as preferred.
Key-value stores are mentioned alongside RDBMS as datastore examples; RDBMS is used as the primary skill name to represent this requirement.
'Distributed systems' and 'containers' are named technologies/concepts explicitly called out in a required block; they are retained as concrete infrastructure requirements.
No compensation, remote status, or employment type information is provided in the posting.
Read the full posting
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