Principal Software Development Engineer XBOX Microsoft
Redmond, WA

Job Description

Microsoft's Xbox Hardware teams consist of progressive, diverse, and exceptionally creative professionals who design, test and manufacture some of the best-loved entertainment devices in the world. Our teams ship tens of millions of hardware products every year including the Xbox One X, Xbox One S, a full accessories lineup, and more. Microsoft is the destination for the brightest minds in gaming device design. Come be part of what's next.

Are you passionate about shipping quality products to customers? Are you excited about using data to understand the usage and quality of products and using that data to drive higher quality and great experiences for customers? Are you a software developer with experience instrumenting events in embedded systems for data gathering from devices when they go live? Would you like to be a part of the Xbox team making our products better for gamers? If so, this role might be right for you. We are seeking a qualified candidate for a Principal Software Development / Validation Engineer to drive the instrumentation of our hardware devices enabling us to identify hardware and firmware issues via backend telemetry. The candidate will be a critical member of a team responsible for utilizing telemetry to ensure the quality of our Xbox hardware products from the early architectural stages of a program all the way through sustaining support for units already in customer's hands. The successful candidate will be the technical focal point for designing how we identify error events and send those events through our telemetry system for currently shipping and future Xbox design projects. The focus will be understanding current error events and working with subject matter experts to identify new events we need to instrument to better understand the health of our hardware and firmware system. This will require a deep understanding of the complete telemetry architecture and the interactions between hardware, firmware, and the operating system. The role will include working with hardware, firmware, and software development partners as well as data scientists to select what and how to instrument, and then validating the end-to-end telemetry solutions. The role will also involve debugging recalled hardware units from our beta population to isolate the errors and add pertinent details to bugs to ensure health issues are fixed prior to product release. Passion for shipping high quality products is a must.

* Do you have a minimum BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent?


* Do you have experience with Windows OS kernel mode driver development?


* Do you have experience with the following program languages: C, C++, C#, PERL, Python?


* Do you have a strong software development background interfacing with and debugging hardware or embedded firmware components?


* Do you have extensive experience work across organizational boundaries with proven track record of being able to influence others?


* Do you have experience working with big data sets and an understanding of statistics?



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.

* Partner with hardware and firmware validation subject matter experts to identify health metrics and events to instrument.
* Design and if necessary implement hardware and firmware event into the firmware or operating system kernel code.
* Validate instrumentation code to ensure it sends the correct data to the backend.
* Partner with back-end database teams, data scientists, and visualization teams who will process error events from large populations of devices and represent results in a consumable fashion.
* Design automation to open error logs, extract needed data, and pipe events to backend data warehouses.
* Debug hardware units from our beta population that are throwing errors, isolate and better understand the failures ensuring high quality, informative bugs for our developers to fix.
* Coordinate and align with other Microsoft hardware product teams to leverage how they identify hardware and firmware issues with their products