Software Engineer, Compute Infra HPC

Location: London, United Kingdom. Employees living within 50 miles of a U.S. office or 25 miles of a non-U.S. office are expected to work from a designated Microsoft office at least four days per week, subject to local law and jurisdiction.

Salary: £93,500–£161,800 per year base pay across the United Kingdom.

Company

Microsoft AI builds AI systems intended to advance science, education, productivity, and global well-being.

What you will do

• Design and build distributed services, control planes, and platform APIs for the full lifecycle of AI compute clusters, from capacity ingestion and provisioning through certification, maintenance, repair, upgrades, and decommissioning.
• Build secure-by-default cluster foundations, including bootstrap, Kubernetes control planes, networking, identity and access, image distribution, secrets, infrastructure as code, and cluster metadata across Azure and partner clouds.
• Automate rack and node qualification, topology validation, scale testing, and the transition from delivered hardware to healthy, schedulable fleet capacity.
• Develop telemetry, diagnostics, health, and lifecycle systems that detect, isolate, and remediate unhealthy hardware, hosts, networks, and storage with minimal manual intervention.
• Build policy-driven automation for certification, maintenance, and safe software or platform rollouts and rollbacks; use benchmarks, workload profiles, production evidence, and fault injection to improve reliability and recovery.
• Partner with research, hardware health, networking, storage, security, and datacenter teams while providing technical leadership through design reviews, architecture decisions, mentoring, and complex cross-team initiatives.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field and 4+ years of software engineering experience building production distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, or control-plane services, or equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience designing and implementing scalable software for cloud, datacenter, cluster, or fleet infrastructure using one or more general-purpose languages such as Go, Rust, C++, C#, Java, or Python.
• Experience with Kubernetes or comparable cluster-orchestration systems, Linux systems, public-cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code or declarative configuration.
• Ability to debug complex behavior across service, control-plane, operating-system, networking, and hardware boundaries and turn findings into robust software improvements.
• Experience leading projects across multiple teams and communicating technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of software engineering experience building distributed systems or infrastructure platforms, or equivalent experience.
• Experience managing hyperscale compute infrastructure with thousands of nodes, multiple clusters, heterogeneous accelerator generations, or capacity across multiple cloud and datacenter providers.
• Experience with bare-metal provisioning, cluster and node lifecycle management, health checking, certification, maintenance, repair automation, capacity management, or decommissioning.
• Depth in Kubernetes internals or related orchestration technologies, including controllers, operators, schedulers, autoscalers, kubelet, Cluster API, container runtimes, or workflow engines.
• Experience with cloud foundations such as virtual networking, CNI, private connectivity, DNS, workload identity, RBAC, secrets, image and artifact distribution, and Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code systems.
• Experience designing health, diagnostics, and remediation platforms using event-driven architectures, durable workflows, state machines, telemetry pipelines, automated decisioning, and safe recovery mechanisms.
• Low-level systems experience with Linux kernels, device drivers, firmware, BMC or Redfish, secure boot or attestation, virtualization, or hardware-health agents.
• Experience with GPU or accelerator systems, InfiniBand, RoCE or RDMA, NVLink, NCCL or collective communication, high-performance storage, and data movement.
• Experience owning production reliability and incident response while eliminating recurring toil through software and automation.
• Ability to write clean, testable, maintainable, secure, and well-documented code, make sound decisions about correctness, scalability, operability, and platform evolution, mentor engineers, align senior stakeholders, and drive multi-quarter technical initiatives.
• Passion for rapidly evolving infrastructure technologies and improving the reliability, efficiency, understandability, and usability of large compute systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on work at the boundary of distributed systems and AI supercomputing.
• Collaboration with research, hardware, networking, storage, security, and datacenter teams.
• Opportunity to improve compute infrastructure used by large-scale AI systems and researchers.
• Eligible roles may include benefits and additional compensation.
• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations during the application process.