Senior Data Engineer

The Product Engineering Partnership pillar is the connective tissue between Data Engineering and Global Skilling product teams. It spans telemetry and instrumentation, semantic modeling for products, experimentation, customer and end-user feedback pipelines, catalog and content management, external reporting for ASN (Applied Skills Navigator), and the Insights and Analytics feedback loop back to product.

As Senior Data Engineer for Product Engineering Partnership, you will serve as the technical lead embedded with product engineering—owning telemetry contracts that ship with Global Skilling products, building the experimentation data backbone, and ensuring that insights flow back to product teams as actionable signals.

This is an individual contributor role for a product engineer who pairs deep production data experience with strong partnership instincts—someone who can co-design instrumentation with product engineering, operate experimentation infrastructure at scale, and translate product questions into data systems.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees. We encourage all candidates to apply, including those who may not feel they meet every preferred qualification—research shows that diverse experiences and perspectives strengthen our work.

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 to innovate, collaborate, and support shared goals. Each day, we live our values of respect, integrity, and accountability as we build an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

• Own telemetry contracts and instrumentation that ship with Global Skilling products (e.g., Microsoft Learn, ASN, Skilling Catalog)
• Design and operate experimentation data infrastructure, including A/B testing pipelines, metric definitions, and significance tooling
• Build catalog and content management data integrations across the Global Skilling product surface
• Lead semantic model design for product analytics in partnership with Reporting and Analytics teams
• Build and maintain external (end-customer) reporting pipelines for ASN and partner-facing products
• Operate Insights and Analytics feedback loops, including pipelines that surface usage patterns, customer feedback, and product signals to engineering teams
• Mentor Data Engineer II (DE II) engineers on telemetry design, experimentation practices, and product–engineering partnership approaches
• Partner with Microsoft-wide alignment forums to align WISE telemetry standards with broader Microsoft frameworks
• Provide on-call leadership for product-tier pipelines (severity levels 1–3)
• Embody our Culture and Values

Why This Role Matters at Scale

Telemetry is how product engineering learns what's working. Without rigorous instrumentation and a tight feedback loop, product decisions fly blind. At 1B+ learner scale, this role is what turns Global Skilling products into a data-driven, continuously-improving system.

Required Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years of experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years of experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering
• OR equivalent experience

Other Requirements

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements may be 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

• 5+ years of experience building production data systems on Azure (ADLS, Synapse, Fabric, or Databricks) or comparable cloud platforms
• Demonstrated experience instrumenting product telemetry and owning end-to-end data contracts with product engineering teams

• Experience with experimentation platforms, A/B testing data, or feature-flag analytics infrastructure
• Demonstrated distributed systems fundamentals; experience with PySpark, SQL, and pipeline orchestration
• Experience mentoring mid-level engineers
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
• Experience with Microsoft internal data platforms (Cosmos, Scope, Conform, Aria)
• Experience with catalog and content management data systems (e.g., Microsoft Learn, ASN, credential catalogs)
• Experience building external or end-customer reporting (e.g., ASN partner reporting)
• Experience designing semantic models for product analytics and decision support
• Experience with AI-driven telemetry discovery (e.g., agent-assisted instrumentation, anomaly detection, intelligent feedback loops)

#E&OJobs, #EOJobs

Data Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.