Forward Deployed Engineer, Platform Engineering

Overview

Come build, from scratch, the AI-first developer platform that lets thousands of engineers ship faster and safer.

We're a new Platform Engineering team building an internal developer platform, golden paths, and the developer experience for the Microsoft engineering teams behind the world's largest and most complex commerce platforms. Empower the teams that build the copilots and agents that tens of thousands of sellers, partners, and support people rely on around the world every day — global scale and reach with unbounded opportunity to make meaningful impact. The mandate is real, and the appetite is there, from leaders and teams: take the KTLO and toil out of engineers' days, make safe deployment the easy path, and make agent-driven workflows the default for how we build.

We run the platform as a product — teams pick it up because it's useful, not because they're told to. What's open is the technical frontier: agents change what a platform can even do. A platform used to be capped by what you could reliably wire together across systems, and the messier work in between fell to people to stitch together by hand. Now agents can take on that ambiguous, cross-system work, and building greenfield, we get to work out how much more a platform can do.

If you'd rather ship and learn than ask permission, and you're as curious about what teams and work become in this shift as you are about the tech itself, this is the rare seat where you get to define the thing, not just run it.

Why this role

• As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you help teams get their highest-leverage systems onto the platform. You partner with a team, in their codebase and with their engineers. You start from the business problem, re-architect the pieces that matter, and respect that the current system encodes hard-won lessons.
• You're measured by outcomes. The win is the system doing its job better in production, owned by the team, not the fact that it moved onto the platform. Adoption is the byproduct of solving the business problem well.
• A new problem every time, business and technical. Each engagement drops you into a different domain: a business to understand, a system to redesign, and the hard technical calls that come with it. You take real problems end to end and move on to the next, instead of maintaining one thing for years.
• You get to use AI to do what wasn't possible before. Agents let you re-architect and modernize systems at a speed and scale that used to be out of reach: months instead of years, and rebuilds that were once too big to take on. You're figuring out, in real systems, how far that leverage actually goes.

• Partner with a team to move one of their high-leverage systems onto the platform, alongside the engineers who own it, through to production.
• Start from the business process: understand how it works and re-engineer it, then design the right system to support it.
• Build the new pieces hands-on, in the team's codebase, using the platform's agents and tooling to move fast.
• Work directly with the team's engineers so they own and run the result when you leave.
• Where migrating a legacy system in one cutover is too risky, take an incremental, strangler-fig path that keeps the business running throughout.
• Own the outcome in production: reliability, safe deployment, and the system doing its job before you exit.
• Feed what you learn back to the platform team, so the tooling and golden paths get better each time.

What we're looking for

• You re-engineer the business, then the system. The most important thing you do is business-process re-engineering: get deep into how a process works and the logic beneath it, rethink it, and design the right system to support it. The architecture follows from understanding the business, not from the shape of the old code.
• Then you build it. A builder-architect who ships: you turn a design like that into a running system with your own hands, in the team's codebase. This is a builder's seat, not an advisory one.
• AI-native. You've shipped production software with generative AI and agents, and you put agents on the mechanical work so your time goes to the hard parts.
• At home joining an unfamiliar codebase and org, partnering with the people who own the system, and earning the trust to deliver.
• Strong distributed-systems, system-design, and cloud foundation (Azure a plus), across the surfaces this work touches: identity, deployment safety, and observability.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree AND 6+ years experience in software engineering, technical program management, or product development — 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. 

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Hands-on experience using generative AI and agents to build production software.
• 3+ years owning delivery of complex cross-team technical projects end to end.
• Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years experience in software engineering, technical program management, or product development — OR equivalent experience.

#EEOPE

Technical Program Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.