Principal AI Back-End Network Systems Lead

Job Title

Principal AI Back-End Network Systems Lead

Role Summary

Technical lead and end-to-end product owner for Back End Network across scale-up and scale-out within Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE). The role spans requirements, architecture, design, integration, validation, manufacturing readiness, deployment, and fleet learning for silicon, NICs/DPUs, switches, optics, cables/backplanes, and fabric topology.

Experience Level

Senior. See Education Requirements for degree and experience equivalencies.

Responsibilities

Lead product architecture and delivery for AI back-end networking across hardware and software layers, ensuring performance, reliability, serviceability, and manufacturability at datacenter scale.

• Define and own product requirements, architecture, milestones, readiness metrics, and risk tradeoffs for scale-up and scale-out Back End Network solutions.
• Translate AI training and inference workload needs into system targets for bandwidth, latency, collective efficiency, reliability, power, cost, and schedule.
• Drive cross-system architecture and interface contracts across accelerator silicon, NICs/DPUs, PHYs/SerDes, retimers, switch ASICs, optics, cables/backplanes, and fabric topology.
• Oversee electrical and optical link behavior, signal integrity, FEC, link training, thermal and manufacturability tradeoffs, and interoperability.
• Specify and validate protocol behavior (Ethernet/RDMA or alternate), flow/congestion control, QoS, routing, loss/recovery, telemetry, and security.
• Connect network design to distributed AI workloads and collectives (all-reduce, all-gather, reduce-scatter, all-to-all); build models, emulation, and prototypes to guide decisions.
• Own validation, bring-up, root-cause analysis, production qualification, manufacturing tests, deployment monitoring, rollback, and fleet-health processes.
• Align and influence internal teams and external partners (silicon, optics, ODM/OEM, open-source) and mentor engineering teams.

Requirements

Core technical skills and product-level systems engineering experience required. Degree and explicit years-of-experience guidance are summarized under Education Requirements.

• Must-have: Deep hands-on expertise in one or more AI/ML networking domains (scale-up interconnects, SerDes/PHY, electrical/optical connectivity, switch systems, scale-out Ethernet/RDMA fabrics, transport/congestion control, collective communication, or workload/fabric performance).
• Must-have: Experience integrating and validating silicon, NICs/DPUs, switch ASICs, firmware, network OS, optics, cables/backplanes, and system software to deliver a cohesive, high-performance product.
• Must-have: Track record leading complex hardware/software products from requirements through validation and production deployment; strong cross-functional leadership and product judgment.
• Must-have: Experience with modeling, simulation, emulation, performance analysis, traffic generation, or topology studies to set budgets and predict bottlenecks.
• Must-have: Experience developing automated validation, stress, reliability, interoperability, telemetry, diagnostics, and fleet-health frameworks; system bring-up and cross-layer debug.
• Other requirement: Ability to meet Microsoft Cloud background check and any required security screening for the role.
• Nice-to-have: Experience with SONiC/Linux networking, ECN/PFC/DCQCN or related congestion-control methods, pluggable or co-packaged optics, and 400G/800G+ link designs.
• Nice-to-have: Experience driving manufacturing readiness, supplier/partner execution, datacenter deployment, and serviceability at hyperscale.

Education Requirements

Required/acceptable: Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field with 7+ years technical engineering experience; OR Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field with 8+ years technical engineering experience; OR equivalent practical experience. Preferred mentions include Bachelor’s in EE/CE/CS or related technical field with 10+ years relevant experience. Fields referenced: Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or related technical disciplines; explicit "or equivalent experience" language is allowed.

About the Company

Company: Microsoft

Headquarters: Redmond, Washington, United States

Microsoft is a global technology company that develops and sells software, services, devices, and solutions. Known for its Windows operating system, Office suite, and Azure cloud platform, Microsoft aims to empower individuals and organizations around the world to achieve more. The company fosters a culture of innovation and inclusion, focusing on delivering trusted experiences to customers and partners globally.