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Copilot CLI skill: Interview Packet — turns candidate materials + role library into an interviewer-ready packet

Raw

name	interview-packet
description	Prepare an interview packet from a candidate interview folder plus a role library file. Use when the user wants a candidate packet reviewed, a resume normalized from PDF to Markdown, and interviewer-ready outputs such as an interview plan, coding problem guide, and note form. Load the role from hr/role-library and stop if the role file does not exist.
license	Proprietary. LICENSE.txt has complete terms

Interview Packet

Use this skill to turn a candidate's interview materials into a lightweight interviewer packet.

Inputs

The user should provide:

A candidate folder with interview materials
A target role, which should map to a file in hr/role-library/

The candidate materials may vary in filename and format. Infer the useful inputs from what is present. Typical materials include:

an interview brief or interview description
a job description
a resume, often as PDF

If the resume is a PDF, convert it to resume.md in the candidate folder before proceeding.

Role Loading

Load the role from:

hr/role-library/<ROLE>.md

If that file does not exist, stop and tell the user they need to add it before proceeding. Do not substitute the job description for the role library.

Static Interview Flow

Use this interview flow as the baseline:

go over the agenda
introduce yourself
ask the candidate to introduce themselves
ask 3 behavioral questions relevant to the role and the candidate
run a technical challenge, usually coding unless the user asks for design
leave 5 minutes for candidate questions

Canonical repo source:

hr/interviews/interview-flow.md

Outputs

Write the outputs into the candidate folder:

interview-plan.md
coding-problem-guide.md
interview-note-form.md

Also create resume.md when resume normalization is needed.

Guidance

Be pragmatic and concise.
Use the role library as the primary source of expectations.
Use the candidate materials to tailor the packet.
Make reasonable choices without over-specifying the process.
For SWE roles, prefer a practical coding problem unless the user asks otherwise.
Choose the candidate's likely interview language from their background and explain the choice briefly.

Output Intent

The packet should be immediately usable by the interviewer:

interview-plan.md should outline the interview and what to look for
coding-problem-guide.md should contain a copy-paste-ready prompt plus a reference solution
- Copy-ready prompts must be plain text — no blockquote > prefixes, no markdown formatting that would need to be stripped before reading aloud or pasting into chat
interview-note-form.md should be easy to use live during the interview

Stop Conditions

Stop and tell the user what is missing if:

the candidate folder cannot be found
the role library file cannot be found
there is not enough candidate material to prepare the packet

Raw

SWE-IC3.md

Software Engineering — IC3 Role Library

Profession: Software Engineering
Discipline: Software Engineering

Role Summary

Independently uses appropriate artificial intelligence tools and practices across the software development lifecycle.

Works with appropriate internal stakeholders to understand customer and user requirements for a defined set of features.

Creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, executes test plans, and builds testable code. Creates extensible and maintainable product feature code for minimal defects. Reviews product feature code to ensure it contains the correct test coverage and follows team standards. Implements debugging tools, tests, logs, and telemetry to verify assumptions. Strives for automation within production deployment aiming for zero-touch when possible. Applies and reviews coding patterns, security risks, and compliance issues in code reviews. Applies security best practices to achieve security hardening across product features.

Capabilities & Skills

Communicating to Drive Mutual Success

Articulating messaging in a clear and respectful manner to achieve collaborative and mutually beneficial outcomes while ensuring all parties are heard, understood, and aligned towards shared goals.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

English Language Proficiency: The ability to speak and understand English when giving instructions and directions, and when talking with colleagues, managers, and others for work matters.
Oral Communication: The ability to make a verbal message understood and to receive or understand messages during in-person or remote interactions.
Written Communication: The ability to prepare clear, accurate, and understandable written text, and follow the basic rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This may include memos, emails, proposals, reports, and professional or general correspondence.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Collaborative Innovation: Knowledge of others' expertise and the ability to involve multiple players, within and outside the organization, in the creation or development of novel products, processes, or research streams.
Conflict Resolution: The ability to manage conflict, disharmony, and strife among people and situations, while recognizing and addressing sensitivities.

Designing and Architecting Business Solutions

Designing and architecting products, services, and systems by employing design principles across diverse technological solutions and guiding projects through each phase of the engineering lifecycle to ensure alignment with business goals and customer satisfaction.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Engineering Lifecycle: Knowledge of the engineering lifecycle that provides for task estimation, design and code review, specification review, bug triage, code check-in, sign-off, test targeting, and performance standards to meet customer and business goals.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Architecture Design: The ability to apply reference architecture and patterns for a variety of solutions, including advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, big data, Internet of Things, modern business intelligence and analytics, modern applications, data platform modernization, data warehousing, and related domains.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Knowledge of artificial intelligence and data science including machine learning, data mining, machine vision, search knowledge graphs, or natural language processing.
Resilient System Design: Knowledge of and capability to design products, services, and systems that are resilient to the iteration and change required by the needs of the business.
Technical Domain: Knowledge of a specific technology domain such as analytics, applications, web, mobile, big data, business continuity, disaster recovery, compute, containers, databases, developer tools, Internet of Things, management tools, microservices, or storage.
Technology Selection: The ability to choose the appropriate internal or external technologies, incorporate research, and create designs and validation collateral, including reusable test automations, and to judge which practices work well.

Driving Solution Improvement and Excellence

Leading the validation of innovative products, services, and solutions through pinpointing opportunities for improvement, monitoring and testing systems, and fostering strategic solutions to identified challenges or issues.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Automation: Knowledge of automation technologies, methods, and processes used for quality and cost improvements.
Livesite Skills: The ability to anticipate, mitigate, and resolve issues on a recurring basis in a large-scale, distributed cloud environment.
Process and Solution Curiosity: Suggests and encourages new ideas for existing processes, solutions based on customer needs, and changes to improve team culture. Champions creative solutions and proposes ideas that empower the organization to lead and stay ahead of competition.
Runtime Analysis: The ability to use a computing system analysis and execution approach based on extracting information from a running system and using it to detect and possibly react to observed behaviors satisfying or violating certain properties.
Testing Process: Knowledge of testing processes and tools, including procedures, standards, root cause analysis, test cycles, techniques, problem reporting, conventions, approaches, and statistical process controls.

Engineering Robust Software Solutions

Employing computer science principles to design, develop, and optimize scalable algorithms, distributed systems, business applications, and other software solutions.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Algorithm Design and Implementation: The ability to design, analyze, implement, optimize, profile, and experimentally evaluate computer algorithms. Includes knowledge of practical applications of algorithms in software engineering.
Computer Science: The ability to apply computer science principles such as data structures, algorithms, run-times, statistics, and computer architecture to implement, adapt, or apply concepts when programming.
Software Development: Knowledge of the software development process, including conception, specification, design, programming, documentation, testing, and bug fixing to create and maintain applications, frameworks, or other software components.
Writes Code: The ability to write clear and efficient code in one or more relevant computer programming languages such as Java, C or C++, Python, or JavaScript to develop computer programs that solve a business problem.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

AI Fluency: The ability to leverage artificial intelligence tools to generate written material or ideas. This encompasses crafting clear prompts, understanding AI capabilities and limitations, refining generated content, and integrating human creativity for optimal results.
Distributed Systems Application Development: The ability to use computers or workstations as a platform for developing business applications in a distributed or cooperative design using the tools applicable to each approach, in an environment where processing occurs on more than one processor for a transaction to complete.
Security Principles: The ability to follow secure-by-design principles to ensure a secure foundation in the design of solutions.

Enhancing Product and Project Execution

Streamlining project lifecycles through the integration of project and product planning and quality assurance methods to ensure all phases of a project are planned, assessed, and aligned with strategic goals and to optimize performance and project outcomes.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Detail Oriented: The ability to attend to and verify the accuracy and completeness of detailed information in documents, on the computer, and in other work products. This includes being able to code, file, compile, transcribe, classify, and track details from a variety of different sources, problems, or issues.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Design Readiness: The ability to deliver informed designs and plans ahead of production and execution. This includes ensuring there is time for feedback and iterations before deadlines.
Product Lifecycle: Knowledge of the overall process for developing, releasing, and maintaining products. This includes knowledge of the roles and responsibilities of engineering and other functions, major phases, checkpoints, and deliverables, plus the ability to identify common issues and considerations for delivering, updating, or deprecating a product.
Quality Assurance: Knowledge of and the ability to follow systematic and continuing processes of checking whether a product, service, or process is meeting specified requirements. This includes knowledge of quality measurements and defined standards.
Regulatory Compliance: Knowledge of the rules, regulations, sanctions, and other statutory requirements, guidelines, and instructions relating to local or international governing bodies and organizations, both internally and externally.

Solving Problems Through a Data-Driven Approach

Extracting actionable insights to understand their implications within the broader organizational context; solving problems and making decisions through a swift, informed, and strategic approach.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Agility: Ability to think, understand, and process information quickly.
Problem Solving: The ability to identify problems and review related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Data Analysis: The ability to systematically gather information from a variety of sources, analyze information, identify implications of data, draw conclusions, generate alternatives and solutions, and evaluate the consequences of choosing each alternative using quality metrics and data.
Decision Making: The ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. This includes defining, diagnosing, and determining an appropriate resolution, recommendation, or decision while considering alternatives and factors such as resources, costs, and tradeoffs.
Systems Thinking: The ability to analyze and recognize how a system's parts interrelate and how sub-systems work over time within the context of larger systems. This includes viewing systems with a broad perspective and identifying overall structures, patterns, and cycles.

Responsibilities

AI-Native Development

Uses appropriate artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) in a disciplined manner. Takes responsibility for the content of their AI-generated changes to artifacts, reviewing all changes and applying appropriate tooling and processes with minimal guidance.

Coding

Supports efforts to use debugging, tests, tools, logs, telemetry, and other methods to proactively verify assumptions before issues occur for product features in production. Conducts incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, implements repair actions, and identifies mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence with minimal supervision. Under minimal guidance, applies least-access principles, and uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security.

Reviews product feature code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product feature. Contributes to bringing insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills with minimal guidance. Contributes to code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team. Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews. Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process with minimal supervision.

Creates and implements code for a product, service, or feature, reusing code as applicable with minimal supervision. Writes and learns to create code that is extensible and maintainable. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability with few defects, and understands when the code is ready to be shared and delivered. Applies coding patterns and best practices to write code (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions). Escalates identified blockers or unknowns during the development process, communicates how they will impact timelines, and contributes to identifying strategies and/or opportunities to address them with minimal supervision.

Design

Understands and provides feedback for proposals for architecture, with technical leadership from others. With minimal supervision, tests and explores various design options for a product/solution feature, outlining strengths and weaknesses of each option. Collaborates with architects with minimal supervision to build and modify a product/solution feature, providing feedback as needed. Begins to own or collaborate with other engineers on the architecture of solutions, following technical leadership as applicable. Contributes to the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements with oversight. Develops an awareness of the current technology landscape. Escalates and shares findings from investigations with the team and owns some design decisions. Helps to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Contributes to the refinement of product features by escalating findings from analyses to inform decisions regarding the engineering of products.

Creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code with minimal supervision. Executes test plans that incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases) with minimal supervision. Adds new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of tests in the feature area. Builds testable code and considers testability during design for a set of features with minimal guidance. Understands the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry. Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation with minimal supervision.

Contributes to identifying dependencies, and incorporates them into the development of design documents for a product area with little oversight. Helps to actively identify other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Understands downstream interactions between systems. Contributes to collaborating with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap.

Engineering Excellence

Contributes to the identification of requirements for, and development of automation within production and deployment of a complex product feature, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Runs code in simulated, or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime for products with little to no oversight.

Applies best practices to build code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Follows best practices for product development and scaling to customer requirements, and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.

Builds knowledge, shares new ideas, and shares pinpoints of engineering tool gaps to improve software developer tools to support easier, faster, and more effective software engineering for complex product features. Identifies whether open source or internal code is available to address coding needs for a set of product features, and reuses it in a responsible manner where applicable. Develops higher-level awareness of tools outside current areas of expertise. Helps to identify and/or create tools that are useful for building the product, determining if methods are still applicable for the current solution.

Understands and applies security best practices and establishes code invariants to model "security as code," ensuring each layer is independently secure, and minimizing risk with minimal supervision. Adopts security standards for clear security code review practices for a set of product features that align with design and engineering principles to raise the security hardening for both protections and detections. Contributes to incorporating deployment gates on security controls, and scanners for a set of product features to prevent regressions and/or vulnerabilities that would have customer impact. Includes required security monitoring to ensure detection of violations with minimal guidance. With minimal supervision, works with relevant security partners to define security promises and security invariants while factoring in attacker/investigator personas for security monitoring and telemetry needs, ensure threat models and premortems validate upstream and downstream assumptions and security invariants, establish security breach drills and security incident response processes (e.g., impact analysis, containment), and ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) safety features are implemented for the AI production systems tied to a set of product features.

Contributes to efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility. Checks for visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for product areas. Develops and holds an understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are met.

Works with partner teams to ensure a set of product features work well with the components of the partner team with minimal supervision, contributing to efforts to ensure proper end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance, and DRI escalation pathways are established before going live.

Remains current in skills by investing time and effort into being informed of current developments that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale. Conducts learning and literary sessions to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge) with minimal guidance.

Implement

Reviews work items to deepen knowledge of product features in partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) and executes project plans, release plans, and work items. Contributes to efforts to break down larger work items into smaller work items and providing estimation. Escalates issues that might cause a delay. Ensures required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning with minimal guidance. Contributes to ensuring project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Ensures all code for a set of product/solution features is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents with minimal supervision. Calculates capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of features with minimal guidance. Makes considerations for efficient operation of a set of features after it is live with minimal supervision. Contributes to establishing a rollback plan for a set of features.

Learns about and supports deployment to customers by following the correct measures to push features out to customers. Follows safe change deployment practices (e.g., ensuring that flights are set correctly) for their team to minimize adverse impact to users and other services with managerial guidance. Learns about and applies best practices for the deployment of features safely with managerial oversight and/or guidance from more experienced peers. Contributes to monitoring dependency status and ensuring that only the latest, secure versions are deployed. Identifies when rollback plans should be enacted for a product feature with direct supervision. Contributes to building deployment infrastructure to allow developers' private builds for a product feature to be tested in a production-like environment.

Leveraging internal experimentation infrastructures, conducts experiments that determine the impact of changes, using feature flags/flighting in their code. Collaborates with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to incorporate success and guard rail metrics for experimentation with minimal guidance.

Reliability and Supportability

Maintains operations of live site service, following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Identifies solutions and mitigations to simple issues and complex issues when applicable impacting performance or functionality of live site services and escalates appropriately. With minimal supervision, improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests, and telemetry to make on-call better, and recommends user-facing support documentation and additional test coverage to reduce likelihood of future user-initiated incidents. Contributes to enabling secure operations, security monitoring, and integration with live site investigation activities with minimal oversight. Identifies and proposes opportunities (e.g., lunch talks, automation, practices, tools) that can be leveraged to improve the live site experience with minimal guidance.

Identifies areas to contribute to efforts to integrate logging and instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms, and for allowing monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios for both live and A/B experiments for products, services, and offerings. Leverages telemetry feedback and effectiveness to contribute to improving subsequent monitoring designs with minimal guidance. Contributes to efforts to classify, and analyze data with little oversight on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring), and helps to create outputs (e.g., notifications, dashboards) that improve monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios, system monitoring and/or issue identification and mitigation. Considers the privacy implications of telemetry code changes, and adding new data points with minimal guidance.

Acts as a designated responsible individual (DRI), working on-call to monitor a system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to the status and gains approval to restore system/product/service for simple problems. Responds within service level agreement (SLA) timeframe. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.

Understand User Requirements

Works with appropriate internal stakeholders (e.g., product manager, privacy/security subject matter expert, technical lead) to understand and determine customer/user requirements for a set of features. Incorporates customer insights into future designs or solution fixes with minimal supervision. Incorporates unwritten requirements, such as appropriate continuous feedback loops that measure actionable, quantitative (e.g., customer value, usage patterns, solution performance) and qualitative (e.g., accessibility, globalization) indicators of value. Understands, and begins providing feedback on, and advocating for the security and privacy needs of the customer who will be using the set of features.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 3+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 5+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Raw

SWE-IC5.md

Software Engineering — IC5 Role Library

Profession: Software Engineering Discipline: Software Engineering

Role Summary

Improves artificial intelligence tools and practices across the software development lifecycle. Partners with internal stakeholders to determine customer/user requirements for scenarios. Leads discussions for architecture of complex products ensuring test strategies for solution quality. Mentors in identifying dependencies and producing extensible code across teams. Leads debugging efforts and application of coding patterns to improve code quality. Develops automation for production deployment targeting zero-touch when possible. Ensures visibility for compliance through audit trails and maintains understanding of regulations. Advocates new trends to adapt them to current problems and shares knowledge with peers. Supports collaboration with partner teams, ensuring proper integration before going live.

Capabilities & Skills

Communicating to Drive Mutual Success

Articulating messaging in a clear and respectful manner to achieve collaborative and mutually beneficial outcomes while ensuring all parties are heard, understood, and aligned towards shared goals.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Conflict Resolution: The ability to manage conflict, disharmony, and strife among people and situations, while recognizing and addressing sensitivities.
English Language Proficiency: The ability to speak and understand English when giving instructions and directions, and when talking with colleagues, managers, and others for work matters.
Oral Communication: The ability to make a verbal message understood and to receive/understand messages during in-person or remote (e.g., telephone) interactions.
Written Communication: The ability to prepare clear, accurate, and understandable written text, and follow the basic rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This may include memos, emails, proposals, reports, and professional or general correspondence.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Collaborative Innovation: Knowledge of others' expertise and the ability to involve multiple players (within and outside the organization) in the creation or development of novel products, processes, or research streams.
Negotiation: The ability to achieve mutually satisfying agreements in negotiations with others by listening to their objectives, acting as the company's representative to effectively communicate the company's objective, and seeking common ground and collaborative solutions.

Designing and Architecting Business Solutions

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Architecture Design: The ability to apply reference architecture and patterns for a variety of solutions (e.g., advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, big data, Internet of Things, modern business intelligence and analytics, modern applications, data platform modernization, data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics, etc.).
Engineering Lifecycle: Knowledge of the engineering lifecycle that provides for task estimation, design and code review, specification review, bug triage, code check-in, sign-off, test targeting, and performance standards to meet customer and business goals.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Knowledge of artificial intelligence and data science including machine learning, data mining, machine vision, search knowledge graphs, or natural language processing.
Domain Knowledge: Knowledge of the functional area(s) that an executive is communicating within (e.g., Finance, HR, Sales).
Resilient System Design: Knowledge of and capability to design products, services, and systems that are resilient to the iteration and change required by the needs of the business.
Strategic Technical Implementation: The ability to lead efforts to validate a product or service or architectural innovations. Identifies critical design areas early in the development process.
Technical Domain: Knowledge of a specific technology domain (e.g., analytics, applications, web, mobile, big data, business continuity, disaster recovery, compute, containers, databases, developer tools, Internet of Things, Management tools, microservices, storage).
Technology Selection: The ability to choose the appropriate internal or external technologies, incorporate research, and create designs and validation collateral, including test automations that are reused across the teams, and is an excellent judge of practices that work well.

Driving Solution Improvement and Excellence

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Automation: Knowledge of automation technologies, methods, and processes used for quality and cost improvements.
Livesite Skills: The ability to anticipate, mitigate, and resolve issues on a recurring basis, in a large-scale, distributed cloud environment.
Process and Solution Curiosity: Suggests and encourages generation of new ideas for existing processes, new solutions based on customer needs, and changes to improve team culture. Champions creative solutions and proposes new ideas that can empower the organization to lead and stay ahead of competition.
Runtime Analysis: The ability to use a computing system analysis and execution approach based on extracting information from a running system and using it to detect and possibly react to observed behaviors satisfying or violating certain properties.
Testing Process: Knowledge of testing processes and tools, including procedures, standards, root cause analysis, test cycles, techniques, problem reporting, conventions, approaches, and statistical process controls.

Engineering Robust Software Solutions

Employing computer science principles to design, develop, and optimize scalable algorithms, distributed systems, business applications, and other software solutions.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Algorithm Design and Implementation: The ability to design, analyze, implement, optimize, profile and experimentally evaluate computer algorithms. Includes knowledge of practical applications of algorithms in software engineering.
Computer Science: The ability to apply computer science principles (e.g., data structures, algorithms, run-times), statistics and computer architecture to implement, adapt, or apply concepts when programming.
Software Development: Knowledge of the software development process, including conception, specification, design, programming, documentation, testing, and bug fixing to create and maintain applications, frameworks, or other software components.
Writes Code: The ability to write clear and efficient code in one or more relevant computer programming languages (e.g., Java, C/C++, Python, JavaScript) to develop computer programs that solve a business problem.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

AI Fluency: The ability to leverage artificial intelligence tools to generate written material or ideas. This encompasses crafting clear prompts, understanding AI capabilities and limitations, refining generated content, and integrating human creativity for optimal results.
Distributed Systems Application Development: The ability to use computers/workstations as a platform for developing business applications in a distributive or cooperative design using the various tools applicable to each approach, in an environment where processing occurs on more than one processor in order for a transaction to be completed.
Security Principles: The ability to follow secure-by-design principles to ensure a secure foundation in the design of solutions.

Enhancing Product and Project Execution

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Detail Oriented: The ability to attend to and verify the accuracy and completeness of detailed information in documents, on the computer, and/or in other work products. This includes being able to code, file, compile, transcribe, classify, and/or track details from a variety of different sources/problems/issues.
Quality Assurance: Knowledge of and the ability to follow systematic and continuing processes of checking to see whether a product, service, or process is meeting specified requirements. This includes knowledge of quality measurements and defined standards.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Design Readiness: The ability to deliver informed designs and plans ahead of production and execution. This includes the ability to ensure there is time for feedback and iterations for deadlines.
Product Lifecycle: Knowledge of the overall process for developing, releasing, and maintaining products. This includes knowledge of the roles and responsibilities of engineering and other functions, major phases, checkpoints, and deliverables. This also includes the ability to identify common issues and considerations for delivering, updating, or deprecating a product.
Project Management: Knowledge of and the ability to carry out the process of planning, organizing, and managing tasks and resources to accomplish a well-defined objective. This includes the ability to manage and provide project deliverables, optimize the contribution of the people involved, and assess the impact of project decisions on quality, productivity, schedules, cost, performance, etc.
Project Visioning: The ability to create effective and forward-thinking strategies and action plans for both long-term and short-term projects. This includes the ability to engage others to commit to the vision by communicating specific goals and objectives.
Readiness Assessments: The ability to conduct a formal inspection process to determine if a final information technology solution or automated system that has been developed, implemented and tested, and is ready for release into the production environment for sustained operations and maintenance support.
Regulatory Compliance: Knowledge of the rules, regulations, sanctions and other statutory requirements, guidelines and instructions relating to local and/or international governing bodies and organizations, both internally and externally.

Solving Problems Through a Data-Driven Approach

Extracting actionable insights to understand their implications within the broader organizational context; solving problems and making decisions through a swift, informed, and strategic approach.

Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Agility: Ability to think, understand, and process information quickly.
Decision Making: The ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. This includes the ability to define, diagnose, and determine an appropriate resolution, recommendation, or decision while considering alternatives and factors (e.g., resources, costs, tradeoffs).
Problem Solving: The ability to identify problems and review related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.
Systems Thinking: The ability to analyze and recognize how a system's parts interrelate and how sub-systems work over time within the context of larger systems. This includes the ability to view systems with a broad perspective and identify overall structures, patterns, and cycles.

Not Required Upon Hire and Critical/Important

Data Analysis: The ability to systematically gather information from a variety of sources, analyze information, identify implications of data, draw conclusions, generate alternatives and solutions, and evaluate the consequences of choosing each alternative using quality metrics and data. This includes the ability to convert general data and findings into applied, specific information and suggestions that add value to business planning and strategies.

Responsibilities

AI-Native Development

Improves artificial intelligence (AI) tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Proactively takes responsibility for the content of their AI-generated requirements, design documents, code, and other assets, assisting other members of the team to do the same. Incorporates Responsible AI practices into the SDLC to ensure appropriate controls over AI-generated assets. Applies SDLC and engineering health measures (e.g., Accelerate, SPACE framework, Engineering System Success Playbook [ESSP]) to guide improvements to processes and practices, especially those involving AI. Experiments with AI tools and practices to improve their own capabilities, and provides recommendations on how to adopt them to other members of the team.

Coding

Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across products that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Identifies and anticipates blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalates them, communicates how they will impact timelines, and then leads efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them.

Leads efforts on using debugging tools, tests, logs, telemetry, and other methods, and proactively leads verification of assumptions while developing code before issues occur across products in production. Leverages minimal telemetry data, triangulates issues, and resolves with minimal iterations. Leads incident retrospectives to identify root causes of problems, the implementation of repair actions, and the identification of mechanisms to prevent incident recurrence. Proactively applies least-access principles, uses logging, telemetry, and other appropriate mechanisms to investigate issues while retaining privacy and security, and drives those practices across the team.

Reviews product code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Brings insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills. Conducts code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team. Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews, providing feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process.

Design

Owns and leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Leads the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions. Leads efforts to ensure system architecture and individual designs meet performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold (COGS), and other requirements and expectations. Upholds Microsoft standards of security, privacy, and other compliance requirements and expectations. Understands and coaches less experienced engineers on the importance of building solutions that expand upon the work of others. Leads the refinement of products through data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration. Reviews complex designs/architectures within and across teams to provide recommendations for improvements.

Mentors others on and independently creates a clear test strategy that ensures solution quality, prevents regression from being introduced into existing code. Mentors others on and independently ensures test plans incorporate security testing to validate security invariants (including negative cases). Leads adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite. Mentors others on, and builds testable code and considers testability during design for a set of solutions. Understands the different types of tests that can be done on a particular system (e.g., unit tests), and maintains up-to-date understanding of testing architectures used both across Microsoft and across the industry, and applies them across the architecture as appropriate. Designs and executes plans for redesigning or rearchitecting difficult or untestable sections of code for a set of solutions. Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools for test automation.

Leads identifying dependencies and incorporating them into the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform. Leads the active identification of other teams and technologies to leverage, how they interact, and where their own system or team can support others. Demonstrates deep understanding of upstream and downstream interactions between systems and ensures security, compliance, performance, and reliability can be achieved across the entire stack. Coordinates and collaborates with other teams to reach common goals where dependencies and validation concerns overlap. Enables communications and negotiates across teams to resolve conflicts around dependency ownership and required work. Drives agreements between dependent teams to align to the delivery schedule.

Engineering Excellence

Applies and identifies best practices and shares information with other engineers for building code based on well-established methods and secure design principles while also applying best practices for new code development and formal validation of security invariants. Leads product development and scaling to customer requirements and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations and security promises.

Remains current by investing time and effort into being informed staying abreast of current developments. Proactively seeks new knowledge, evaluating new trends, technical solutions, and patterns, assessing how to adapt them to current problems, and shares knowledge with other engineers. Conducts learning and literary sessions to raise awareness on relevant engineering design principles (e.g., security, testability, performance, scalability, accessibility, product knowledge).

Leads efforts to use and enhance, or build, new software developer tools to support easier, faster, and more effective software engineering across products. Identifies whether open source or internal code is available to address coding needs for a set of products, and reuses it in a responsible manner where applicable. Develops substantial skills in tools inside and outside current areas of expertise. Leads identification and/or creation of tools that are useful for building the product. Shares best practices and teaches others about new tools and strategies.

Leads efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility across solutions and teams. Creates and assures the presence of visible evidence (e.g., audit trail) to demonstrate compliance for products. Develops and maintains a deep understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are followed and met.

Understands and applies security best practices and establishes code invariants to model "security as code," ensuring each layer is independently secure, and minimizing risk. Supports and/or adopts, and may set security standards for clear security code review practices for a set of products that align with design and engineering principles to raise the security hardening for both protections and detections. Proactively incorporates deployment gates on security controls, and scanners for a set of products to prevent regressions and/or vulnerabilities that would have customer impact. Includes required security monitoring to ensure detection of violations. Collaborates with relevant security partners to define security promises and security invariants for the design of a product/solution while factoring in attacker/investigator personas for security monitoring and telemetry needs, ensure threat models and premortems validate upstream and downstream assumptions and security invariants, establish security breach drills and security incident response processes (e.g., impact analysis, containment), and ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) safety features are implemented for the AI production systems tied to a set of products.

Collaborates with partner teams to ensure a set of products work well with the components of the partner team, ensuring proper end-to-end testing, live-site coverage, scalability, performance, and DRI escalation pathways are established before going live.

Considers and leads the identification of requirements for, and the comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment across products, targeting zero-touch deployment when possible. Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime across products.

Implement

Leads efforts for experiments that determine the impact of changes using feature flags/flighting in their code, interprets results, and decides on next steps or ship decision from results. Drives identification of the correct metrics for experimentation in determining improving customer value. Drives collaboration efforts with internal partners (e.g., Data Science, product managers) to ensure incorporation of success and guard rail metrics for experimentation.

Leverages their subject-matter expertise to partner with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., technical program managers) to drive multiple groups' project plans, release plans, and work items. Breaks down long-term project vision into milestones as part of an overall roadmap. Guides other members for project estimation and escalates issues that might cause a major delay. Drives efforts to ensure required security protections and detection processes are accounted for in planning. Drives efforts to ensure project plans adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements. Drives efforts to ensure all code for a set of products/solutions is properly flighted for quicker mitigation of production incidents. Calculates capacity for planning, accounting for appropriate failover and backup/restore mechanisms for disaster recovery for a set of products and/or solutions. Makes considerations for efficient operation of a set of products and/or solutions after it is live. Proactively establishes rollback plans for a set of products and/or solutions.

Leads leveraging existing deployment frameworks in the implementation of solutions within the existing framework, automating deployment tasks when possible to ensure efficiency. Proactively follows safe change deployment best practices (e.g., ensuring that flights are set correctly) for their team to minimize adverse impact to users and other services. Optimizes deployments within products and components to meet differing business objectives. Leads efforts to ensure that solutions are deployed safely, rolling out security-sensitive features only to applicable, relevant customers and scenarios to reduce the attack surface. Proactively monitors dependency status and ensures that only the latest, secure versions are deployed. Defines when rollback plans should be enacted for a set of products. Drives building deployment infrastructure to allow developers' private builds for a set of products/solutions to be tested in a production-like environment.

Reliability and Supportability

Integrates, designs, and reviews others' work across a team or product to integrate logging and instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms, and for allowing monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios for both live and A/B experiments for products, services, and offerings. Leverages telemetry feedback and effectiveness to drives the improvement of subsequent monitoring designs. Ensures solutions are scalable, financially responsible, and meet capture/storage guidelines. Leads efforts to classify, and analyze complex data and analyses on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring), and leads the creation of outputs (e.g., notifications, dashboards) that improve monitoring and investigating security-related concerns and scenarios, system monitoring and/or issue identification and mitigation. Proactively considers the privacy implications of telemetry code changes, and of adding new data points.

Holds accountability as a designated responsible individual (DRI) and mentors other engineers across products/solutions, working on-call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for complex issues. Develops a playbook for the team to resolve issues. Coordinates people and resources to ensure DRI responsibilities are covered across teams. Responds within service level agreement (SLA) timeframe. Has line of sight to incidences and plans to address emerging issues. Leads efforts to reduce incident volume, looking globally at incidences and providing broad resolutions. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.

Maintains operations of live site service, following security best practices when responding quickly to mitigate issues while using the minimum required permissions to do so that arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Implements and helps others implement solutions and mitigations to complex issues impacting the performance or functionality of live site services. Reviews and writes incident postmortem and presents insights that drive changes to reduce or eliminate incidents. Proactively improves troubleshooting guides (TSGs), wikis, tests, and telemetry to make on-call better, and recommends user-facing support documentation and additional test coverage to reduce likelihood of future user-initiated incidents. Enables secure operations, security monitoring, and integration with live site investigation activities. Proactively identifies opportunities (e.g., lunch talks, automation, practices, tools) that can be leveraged to improve the live site experience and executes on them.

Understand User Requirements

Partners with and guides appropriate internal (e.g., product manager, privacy/security subject matter expert, technical lead) and external (e.g. customer escalation team, public forums) stakeholders and leverages expertise to determine and confirm customer/user requirements and their feasibility for a set of scenarios. Seeks and leverages a variety of feedback channels to incorporate customer insights into future designs or solution fixes. Leads incorporation of unwritten requirements, such as appropriate continuous feedback loops that measure actionable, quantitative (e.g., customer value, usage patterns, solution performance) and qualitative (e.g., accessibility, globalization) indicators of value. Determines additional critical metrics. Understands and leads providing feedback on, and advocating for the security and privacy needs of the customer who will be using the set of solutions.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field 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.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.