Sr. Software Engineer - AI Inference & Serving

Sr. Software EngineerMicrosoft Azure AI Inference platform is the next generation cloud business positioned to address the growing AI market. We are on the verge of an AI revolution and have a tremendous opportunity to empower our partners and customers to harness the full power of AI responsibly. We offer a fully managed AI Inference platform to accelerate the research, development, and operations of AI powered intelligent solutions at scale. This team owns the hosting, optimization, and scaling the inference stack for all the Azure AI Foundary models including the latest and greatest from OpenAI, Grok, DeepSeek, and other OSS models.Do you want to join a team entrusted with serving all internal and external ML workloads, solve real world inference problems for state-of-the-art large language (LLM) and multi-modal Gen AI models from OpenAI and other model providers? We are already serving billions of inferences per day on the most cutting-edge AI scenarios across the industry. You will be joining the AI Core Inferencing team, influencing the overall product, driving new features and platform capabilities from preview to General Availability, and many exciting problems on the intersection of AI and Cloud.ResponsibilitiesDesign and implement core inference infrastructure for serving frontier AI models in production.Identify and drive improvements to end-to-end inference performance and efficiency of state-of-the-art LLMs and GenAI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI hosted on AI Foundary.Design and implement efficient load scheduling and balancing strategies, by leveraging key insights and features of the model and workload.Scale the platform to support the growing inferencing demand and maintain high availability.Deliver critical capabilities required to serve the latest and greatest Gen AI models such as GPT5, Realtime audio, Sora, and enable fast time to market for them.Drive generic features to cater to the needs of customers such as GitHub, M365, Microsoft AI and third-party companies.Collaborate with our partners both internal and external.Embody Microsoft's Culture and Values.QualificationsRequired/Minimum Qualifications:Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, or Java OR equivalent experience.Other Requirements: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/Additional Qualifications:Technical background and solid foundation in software engineering principles, distributed computing and architecture.Experience working on high scale, reliable online systems and experience in real-time online services with low latency and high throughput.Experience working with L7 network proxies and gateways.Knowledge in Network architecture and concepts (HTTP and TCP Protocols, Authentication and Sessions etc).Knowledge and experience in OSS, Docker, Kubernetes, C++, Golang, or equivalent programming languages.Cross-team collaboration skills and the desire to collaborate in a team of researchers and developers