Principal Firmware Architect

Microsoft Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft's expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud" mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions.

Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide and we are looking for passionate, high energy engineers to help achieve that mission. As Microsoft's cloud business continues to grow the ability to deploy new offerings and HW infrastructure on time, in high volume with high quality and lowest cost is of paramount importance.

The Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering Firmware Development team is responsible for design and development of Server and Rack Infrastructure Firmware for Microsoft's online services. We work closely with Microsoft product groups, industry partners and researchers to architect and develop server hardware solutions that meet the requirements for our cloud services platforms at the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO). We need to be always learning and insatiably curious.

We need to be willing to lean into uncertainty, take risks and move quickly when we make mistakes, recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. And we need to be open to the ideas of others, where the success of others does not diminish our own.

Our teams are responsible for Firmware development of server, silicon and rack infrastructure design with a focus on innovation for Azure infrastructure for Microsoft and their customers for MAIA and Cobalt product lines.

We are looking to hire a Principal Firmware Architect to join our team. If you are a seasoned engineering manager with passion for building highly reliable, scalable distributed systems; If you want hands-on services architecture experience and like to produce impact across a large number of systems; if you have a penchant to learn and utilize your broad skill set to produce great customer impact; then this opportunity is for you - Join the Azure Firmware Center of Excellence and help us envision and build technical solutions to power Azure.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• Experience with firmware architecture.

• Ability to debug and resolve issues spanning multiple subsystems.

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 Qualifications:

• 12+ years of professional experience designing, architecting and developing software solutions.

• Master's Degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent industry experience.

• Problem solving, troubleshooting skills, advanced design, and development skills.

• Experienced with coaching team members and helping them grow.

• Experience with resolving ambiguity.

• Demonstrable skills in C (Programming).

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $133,600 - $256,800 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 $173,200 - $282,200 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

Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

This role is for a highly motivated Firmware Engineer with a background in Firmware development for embedded systems. You will be contributing to all phases of product development, from design through manufacturing and productization.

You will create the firmware architecture for key systems and work closely with hardware teams to ensure hardware integrates well with the firmware. You will contribute to design of various firmware components, including driver interface, system libraries needed for SoC bring-up, protocol and feature development of low-level hardware.

The candidate should have technical leadership skills, coding skills, debugging and troubleshooting abilities, with experience in firmware development. The successful candidate should have experience with some or all the following: firmware development, SOC bring-up, bootloaders, platform initialization, board support package porting, peripherals such as PCIe, NVMe, I2C, SPI, USB, UARTs. OS primitives, memory management, scheduling, interrupts, threading.