Principal SDE - Blockchain Microsoft
Redmond, WA

Job Description

Blockchain heralds a massive change in the fabric of business and society. Gartner forecasts the business value of blockchain at $176B by 2025 and $3.1T by 2030. The disruption caused by blockchain threatens multiple industries and the dustup that follows will pivot core transactional systems to new rails for the next 25 years. Many of the questions about this transformation that remain to be answered touch on the relationships between businesses, governments and individuals in society, rather than technology. Blockchain offers a model for secure, multi-party computation that unlocks new transactional and collaboration models across organizations. It also ushers in a technology wave targeted towards consortiums of organizations, rather than just single- or two-party schemes.

We believe that cloud technology can empower people and businesses around the world to achieve more, and we see blockchain as a strong complement to Microsoft's existing assets. We are positioned to lead across the spectrum of innovation at the edge that blockchain demands: new math, hardware, platform services, partnerships, competencies, consortiums, market designs, economic models and regulations. The challenges in these areas are substantial - it is not easy for industries to pivot to new networks based on fledgling technology. We are working to bring lighthouse customers to production, and then to reapply the compelling product portfolio that results to accelerate early adopters more broadly. Along the way we will experiment with modern dogfood - where Microsoft comes to the table as both a technology vendor and a corporate customer participating in the very consortiums we are hosting on Azure and Azure Stack. We are building new practices with SIs, ISVs and customers to solve the non-technical obstacles that these new networks present.

Basic Qualifications:

* BS or MS in computer science, engineering, mathematics or a related field, or equivalent industry experience
* 10 years of programming experience writing code in C, C++, C#, Java or other imperative languages; or in ML, Rust, Haskell, Scala or other functional languages

Preferred Qualifications:

* Experience creating v1 products, or within a startup or incubation business
* Passion for mentoring and sponsoring engineers to grow in their careers
* Ability to scale, leveraging senior and junior engineers appropriately
* Ability to think creatively, bring diverse experience to bear on problems, and encourage other diverse perspectives
* Excellence in collaboration across teams within and outside the organization
* Experience working with cloud platforms or business productivity applications
* Experience building distributed systems

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. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to askstaff@microsoft.com.

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

In this role, you will lead development of the blockchain enterprise product offering. You will define and shepherd the architecture of our suite offering to meet customer needs today, and to scale to massive consumption tomorrow. You will collaborate across boundaries with partner teams to create compelling first-party integrations that demonstrate the value of blockchain in business processes and experiences. You will lead the engineering workstreams as we build an incubation business that can unlock a new wave of thought leadership, cloud adoption, business models and value creation.

The product portfolio will consist of multiple layers in the stack, some built from scratch as open source, others built as proprietary extensions to Microsoft's existing platforms.

We seek candidates who are curious about customers to help us create products that customers love in a nascent and hyped market. Experience handling ambiguity and rapid experimentation would be highly valued within our incubation business. Candidates with prior external, startup or v1 experience are especially encouraged to apply. Candidates must have demonstrated collaboration skills to work constructively across functions, groups and timezones to solve customer problems. Finally, we seek candidates who will contribute to a positive culture, where all members of the team can do their best work, creating an advantage out of our diverse set of backgrounds, styles and skill sets.