Engineer and Test opportunities across Europe in October

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:38:46 GMT

As of the 1st of October Microsoft has a variety of exciting development engineer and test engineer roles open across its development centres. Here's some information that may peek your interest. You can find the job descriptions by following the country links on the right hand side of the blog:

IRELAND

At present the Windows Live team is expanding and there is 2 exciting software development engineer (SDEs) roles open in the Windows Mobile team. There is also a lead software development engineer in test (LSDET) and a Test Manager role open in the Windows Live visualisation and graphics team. If you are interested in these roles and think you have the necessary skills please send your CV to v-natsea@microsoft.com.

SWITZERLAND

The swiss team currently has a lead software development engineer in test (LSDET). If you are interested in these roles and think you have the necessary skills please send your CV to v-sarahj@microsoft.com.

ISRAEL

In Israel as I mentioned in previous blogs we are expanding hugely. We presently have over 30 open development engineer and 30 test engineer roles at a wide variety of management and individual contributor levels. In particular we are searching for candidates who have a very strong telecoms background with strong c++ and c# skills... but that's not all we are looking for. To learn more check out the link on the right which leads to Microsoft Israel's career site.

EGYPT

The Egyptian innovation continues to grow quickly at the moment they have a very interesting Lead Development Engineer role open as well as 4 research software development engineers open. If you are interested in these roles and think you have the necessary skills please send your CV to v-astcon@microsoft.com.

DENMARK

In our Danish development centre we currently have over 10 development engineer opportunities ranging across a wide spectrum from Lead Development opportunities right down to SDE roles for engineers with 3+ years experience. The Danish team are also searching for 2 lead software development engineer in test (LSDET) and 1 software development engineer in test (SDET).If you are interested in these roles and think you have the necessary skills please send your CV to cpayne@microsoft.com.

And don't foget when sending your CV don't forget to mention you heard about the job on the blog!

So what does a Software Development Engineer do?

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:33:15 GMT

So what does a SDE or Software Development Engineer actually do in Microsoft? What are some of the daily responsibilities of an SDE and what part of the software development lifecycle are they responsible for?

A little like my blog entry on what does a Program Manager do I am going to refer to an excellent description that was given of the SDE role by Steven Sinofsky (Senior VP of Microsoft) on February 2006 for his MSDN Microsoft TechTalk blog for college grads interested in learning more about careers in Microsoft. The definition very much still holds true today and is the best explanation I have seen for the role anywhere.

Here are some snippets from it:

"Let’s assume program management has done the groundwork to come up with a good range of feature ideas and you’re now facing a long list of potential features. Many of them are exciting. Many are things you wish you had *today*. Some of them look dorky. Some of them look like implementing them in code involves changing the laws of physics. This is where development brings their point of view to the picture and collaborates with program management (and test) to determine what can possibly be implemented.

At this point a lot of organizations would just pass the baton to development and they would take a “spec” or a “market requirements document” and do the set of things that make sense to them, without much of a feedback loop (until perhaps later when some features that were important to the boss fail to show up). In Office, this feedback loop is a critical one that takes a lot of energy—we call this “adds/cuts” since during this time we are building a list of the features we will implement and deciding which ones go on the list (add) and which ones fall off (cut).

At the same time, particularly for work that is reworking past ideas or improving in-market features, developers have their own ideas about what makes sense. Just as a program manager would do, the role of development is to convince program management to devote the bandwidth to adding those features. It goes without saying, but developers dream up some of the coolest ideas around. One of the coolest that I can think of recently has been the evolution of “Watson” – this is the quality assurance feature in Office that uses the internet to reflect back to Microsoft (anonymously and privately and opt-in) the experience customers are having with the software. This was dreamed up and executed by developers in their spare time."

"I love walking by developer offices during this phase of the project. Whiteboards are filled with diagrams of pointers, data structures, and lots of "DO NOT ERASE". There are always heated discussions about what choices to make. It is during this phase that I believe developers make the most crucial decisions of a project. As you know the architecture determines not just what can be built well right now, but how responsive to changing requirements the project will be in the future. While it is great for every architecture you design to be able to respond to any change that is really tough to do in practice. So the best developers are those that work the closest with program management to really understand the direction that things might evolve--to the best of everyone's knowledge. At the same time, it is always worth cautioning that trying to get your PM to say "no I will never ask you for this" might get you into trouble later in the project when things change. That can lead to frustration, but it is of course always the best way to demonstrate the flexibility of your architecture."

To learn more visit the entire description, here.

Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog: Software Development Engineers

Engineer and Test opportunities across Europe in October

So what does a Software Development Engineer do?