Principal Architect Microsoft
Redmond, WA

Job Description

Are you excited about the possibility of working on the largest Object Storage service in the world? Azure Storage team is chartered with building, managing and running the Persistent Cloud Storage for Microsoft Azure Cloud. Azure Storage consists of a Storage Platform which currently powers five different storage services - Blob Storage, Table Storage (NoSql Key Value store), Queue Storage, File Storage (new SMB based File Storage) and Disk Storage. We are one of the foundational services in the Azure Cloud. The service hosts data from some of the largest companies in the world plus supports all of Microsoft's largest online businesses including Xbox, Skype and Bing and has scaled to store exabytes of customer data with the roadmap looking even better in terms of growth.

You can read more about the Service architecture here and about the current storage offerings here.

Storage is divided into three main layers - with the Partition Layer forming the heart of the system and provides the transactional support, querying capability, indexing, geo replication and multi tenancy. Right now is an exciting time for the team as we are working on expanding the range of supported scenarios for the service while working on the next version architecture of the storage service to support the next 100X growth.

Azure Storage is the only Cloud Storage solution which offers hierarchical name space (HNS) on top of Object Storage. HNS allows Big Data Analytics and HPC applications to work in the Cloud in a native fashion without complicated client side solutions. HNS also enables applications written with File System interface in mind to seamlessly move to cloud and enjoy the befits of Cloud. Benefits include scale of the cloud, as well as overall reduction in cost of operations. If you are an area expert in the Hierarchical Name Space & are excited about how to provide HNS at cloud scale for cloud scenarios, this is the role for you.

Basic Qualifications:

* BS, MS, PHD or equivalent experience
* 10+ years of building scalable system software and/or Services

Preferred Qualifications:

* Strong distributed systems knowledge
* Experience in writing multithreaded code in C++
* Hands on development experience including designing and writing code
* Proven ability to plan, schedule and deliver high quality software
* Passion for customers
* Good collaboration skills

Cloud Background check:

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.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

The specific role is for Principal engineer/Software Architect to take long term technical leadership role to evolve the HNS offering to enable even more scenarios. This position will require the candidate to look at all the data abstractions which Azure Storage offers and unify the data access across these abstractions so that silos across these abstractions are broken allowing uniform data access while still providing the most efficient data access. As an architect, you will lay down the ground work for structure and organization of data in cloud which will allow for ease of management & reasoning for applications. The role requires hands on coding experience and is a requirement for any qualified candidate.

To be successful, you must thrive on solving problems related with data durability, availability and concurrency issues in a multi-tenant environment. You must have passion for storage and distributed systems. You will be challenged on a daily basis as you build the largest storage solution Microsoft has. The engineer in this role has to show technical leadership in helping articulate the technical direction over multiple releases. Ideal candidate will bring deep understanding/expertise from hierarchical name space design, implementation and/or with strong distributed system expertise to bring well understood concepts to the cloud.