Principal Hardware Engineer

We are the Azure Memory & Storage Center of Excellence (AMS COE) team at Microsoft, focusing on Memory (DRAM and its replacement) and Storage Devices (SSD and HDD) as building blocks, supporting a secure, reliable, and most trusted cloud experience to customers and partners worldwide. 

AMS COE is part of the Cloud AI and Advanced Systems Engineering (CAASE) organization under SCHIE (Silicon Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering), which is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. 

We are looking for a Principal Hardware Engineer to join our expanding team.  

In this role as a Principal Hardware Engineer you will focus on advanced engineering for Storage, and you will drive innovation for Azure’s Cloud storage across storage devices, their system integration, and their use to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable storage infrastructure and services. The ideal candidate will have both extensive technical expertise and strong people skills to effectively collaborate with different organizations in SCHIE and CAASE, and across Azure at-large. 

At Microsoft, we immensely value culture, mentorship, and acting as One Team. This is an opportunity to leverage your technical expertise by working in a highly collaborative environment to discover, define, and deliver storage innovation at Cloud-scale. 

#AZURE #Cloud #SCHIE #CAASE #AMS 

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 11+ years technical engineering experience

  • OR Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years technical engineering experience

    o OR equivalent experience.

• 9+ years of engineering experience in product development or architecture for storage devices, storage systems or storage software. 
• 5+ years experience with Cloud hardware platform architecture
• 3+ years in technical leadership position involving storage-related projects, including, but not limited to, performance modeling, TCO modeling, QoS, customer use-cases and data flows. Applicability to AI training and inference systems is a plus."

Other Requirement:

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.  

Preferred Qualifications 

• In-depth knowledge of storage-intensive use cases in one or more application areas (e.g. AI, HPC, Databases) 

• Experience with the Cloud system and software solution space in one or more areas, e.g. virtualization / multi-tenancy, data security, manageability at scale, or reliability.  

• Experience with defining and implementing storage-related industry standards, e.g. NVMe, SAS/SATA, PCIe, OCP, TCG 

• Experience with tools for storage and system benchmarking, application profiling, and system resource utilization. 

Hardware Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $161,600 - $286,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $209,600 - $314,400 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 29, 2025

• Identify and assess innovation opportunities for storage devices in Azure, including in areas of performance, security, manageability, sustainability, and total cost of ownership (TCO). 

• Analyse the actual use of storage devices in various Azure fleet systems and applications; identify usage trends as well as current and future pain points. 

• Assess value proposition and technology risks for newly proposed storage device features and capabilities, including those proposed by storage device vendors 

• Define, plan and execute Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) to demonstrate the value and feasibility of the most promising new storage device features and capabilities in Azure systems and use cases. 

• Collaborate with various storage architecture and planning teams in other SCHIE groups as well in Azure at-large 

• Align the storage device vendors and the larger storage ecosystem with the Azure technology roadmap for storage devices, utilizing vendor meetings as well as industry events and conferences.