Software Engineer II

Overview The Client Access Frontend (CAFE) team is responsible for routing TRILLIONS of requests every single day for all the Microsoft365 services – including Copilot, Teams, Exchange, and more! We run a hyperscale high-performance reverse proxy on machines across the planet, and that means we have many interesting routing challenges to solve for the services that use our platform.

We are looking for a Software Engineer II to join our team. On the CAFE team, you will be part of our Core Routing crew that focuses on effective, low-latency routing strategies that enable our millions of users to get requests to the right service. You’ll work with our other feature crews on CAFE to offer world-class routing capabilities and ensure the performance, resiliency, and security of our platform.

On a regular basis, you will use appropriate artificial intelligence tools and practices across the software development lifecycle in a disciplined manner. Engineers are expected to test and explore various design options, outlining strengths and weaknesses of each option, and collaborating with other engineers and stakeholders on the team to deliver these solutions.

Given the nature of our platform, you will need to understand security and privacy considerations and establish code invariants to model "security as code" with guidance.

CAFE is the front door to the biggest and most exciting services that Microsoft offers, and we’re looking for talented engineers like you to join us!

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.

Responsibilities

AI-Native Development

• Learns to use appropriate artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in a disciplined manner. Begins to take responsibility for the content of their AI-generated changes to artifacts, reviewing all changes and requesting help from more experienced members of the team as needed.

Coding

• Learns to review code and helps to review code of others to ensure it meets team standards. Participates in code review processes for self-development, gathers feedback, and learns about coding standards and the team's features. Applies coding patterns and best practices. Learns how and begins to use automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process with minimal supervision.
• Develops and applies knowledge of debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods to begin supporting efforts to proactively flag issues before they occur for product features in production. Learns to conduct incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, and begins to implement repair actions with direct supervision. Grows understanding of and begins to apply least-access principles and uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms with direct supervision to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security.
• With guidance, learns how and creates and implements code for a product, service, or feature reusing code as applicable. Writes and learns to create code that is extensible and maintainable. Learns about and applies diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability, and understands when the code is ready to be shared and delivered. Applies coding patterns and best practices to write code (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions). With guidance from more experienced colleagues, identifies and escalates blockers or unknowns during the development process, and communicates how they will impact timelines.

Design

• Understands proposals and develops an understanding of how to apply them under the technical leadership of others.
• With managerial guidance, tests and explores various design options for a product/solution feature, outlining strengths and weaknesses of each option.
• Produces code to test hypotheses for technical solutions and assists with technical validation efforts.
• Helps with and participates in the development of design documents that support simple user stories with oversight. Develops an awareness of the current technology landscape.
• Escalates findings from investigations to team members for design decisions. Learns about the implications of performance, scalability, resiliency, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations in systems architecture.
• Begins to uphold Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements in systems architecture.
• Develops an understanding of the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others.
• Contributes to the refinement and integration of feedback in product features by escalating findings from analyses to inform decisions regarding the engineering of products.
• Supports the identification of dependencies, and their incorporation into the development of design documents for a product feature with oversight.
• Learns and helps to actively identify other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others.
• Learns about downstream interactions between systems.
• Collaborates with others to understand and execute a defined test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code.
• Assists with executing test plans that incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases) as assigned.
• Builds testable code for a feature under guidance from more experienced peers.
• Understands the most common types of tests and test strategies that can be done for the code for their feature, and begins to develop an understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry.
• Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation with direct managerial oversight.

Engineering Excellence

• Learns about and helps to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility.
• Contributes to efforts to check for visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for product features.
• Develops understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft.
• Develops an understanding of global and local regulations for technologies and system applications.
• Develops an understanding of and applies security best practices and establishes code invariants to model "security as code," ensuring each layer is independently secure, and minimizing risk with direct supervision.
• Begins to adopt security standards for clear security code review practices for a product feature that align with design and engineering principles to raise the security hardening for both protections and detections.
• Supports efforts to incorporate deployment gates on security controls, and scanners for a product feature to prevent regressions and/or vulnerabilities that would have customer impact.
• Includes required security monitoring to ensure detection of violations with direct guidance.
• With direct supervision, contributes to working with relevant security partners to define security promises and security invariants while factoring in attacker/investigator personas for security monitoring and telemetry needs, ensure threat models and premortems validate upstream and downstream assumptions and security invariants, establish security breach drills and security incident response processes (e.g., impact analysis, containment), and ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) safety features are impleme