Principal Optical Network System Engineer

Overview

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate engineers to help achieve that mission.

Microsoft's Hardware Systems organization is developing AI-native silicon and system-level solutions to power the next generation of frontier AI models. The platform combines custom accelerators, advanced networking technologies, large-scale distributed infrastructure, and cloud-scale software to deliver industry-leading AI training and inference capabilities.

The Platform Systems Engineering (PSE) team is seeking a Principal Optical Network System Engineer to lead the architecture, engineering, productization, and deployment of optical interconnect solutions and rack-scale fiber management for next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure. This role will own the product development lifecycle from early concept and technology selection through qualification, manufacturing readiness, and large-scale production deployment.

As the Principal Optical Network System Engineer, you will work across silicon, systems, networking, platform architecture, datacenter engineering, manufacturing, and external ecosystem partners to translate platform requirements into scalable optical products. You will define technical requirements and roadmaps, drive design tradeoffs, lead cross-functional execution, and ensure that optical links, modules, cabling, connectors, and rack-level fiber architectures meet performance, power, reliability, serviceability, cost, and deployment goals.

You may bring deep knowledge of optical systems along with experience in areas such as product architecture, technology development, ecosystem collaboration, or engineering execution. They can influence platform-level decisions across multiple generations of AI infrastructure, align diverse engineering teams and suppliers, manage technical risk, and deliver innovative optical technologies from concept to production at cloud scale. This is a unique opportunity to shape the optical connectivity foundation for Microsoft's future AI systems.

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.