Software Engineer II

Overview

Online advertising is one of the fastest‑growing industries, contributing over $70B to a $600B global market and generating billions of daily ad impressions. Delivering these experiences requires intelligent, resilient, and highly scalable platforms capable of processing massive real‑time data streams.

If you're passionate about building next‑generation distributed systems that power Microsoft’s multi‑billion‑dollar Advertising ecosystem, this is the team for you.

You’ll design and evolve high‑performance backend services, apply modern engineering and AI‑driven techniques to solve real‑world challenges, and collaborate across Ads and Bing organizations to drive measurable impact. We’re a fast‑paced, inclusive team that values ownership, learning, and solving deep technical problems at scale.

Responsibilities

We’re looking for a self‑motivated Backend Software Engineer to join the Vertical Ads engineering team within Microsoft Advertising. You will design, implement, and operate low‑latency, high‑throughput systems that power next‑generation vertical ad experiences across search and partner surfaces.

In This Role, You Will

• Design, build, and operate backend services and data pipelines that handle billions of requests and terabytes of data in real time.
• Work side‑by‑side with Data Scientists to integrate models, features, and signals into reliable, production‑grade systems.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineers across Ads to deliver globally scalable solutions.
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and drive engineering excellence across reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team technical direction, architecture, and long‑term platform evolution.
• Act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI)—owning service availability, monitoring, on‑call rotations, diagnostics, and incident response.
• Continuously adopt new technologies, improve observability, and drive operational excellence for systems at massive scale.
  
  

Core Engineering Responsibilities

• Create, optimize, debug, refactor, and maintain code for performance, reliability, and ROI.
• Write design documents, identify dependencies, and contribute to system roadmaps and release plans.
• Partner closely with stakeholders to drive project execution across engineering, PM, and data science.
• Improve availability, efficiency, and performance through data‑driven engineering and modern operational practices.
  
  

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of hands‑on engineering experience using C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and system design.
• Experience with real‑time data processing and streaming platforms like Kafka or Event Hubs.
• Familiarity with Azure or other cloud platforms (compute, storage, monitoring).
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines, version control (Git), and build systems.
• Knowledge of observability practices: structured logging, telemetry, metrics, and alerting.
• Exposure to AI/ML concepts and experience integrating models into production systems.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• A collaborative team player with a growth mindset and ownership mentality.
• Experience with cloud services beyond Azure.
• Proven ability to contribute to high‑quality, maintainable codebases in fast‑paced environments.
• Strong debugging, problem‑solving, and design skills.
  
  

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.