Senior Software Engineer

The Senior Software Engineer will join a team that builds core features for the VS Code editor, shaping the product through user feedback, experiments and deep technical insight. The role sits at the intersection of product and engineering, helping decide what to build while keeping long‑term maintainability in mind. Day‑to‑day you will discover opportunities, define technical direction, and lead hands‑on design, implementation, testing and delivery of new VS Code capabilities. You'll coordinate contributors and partner‑team dependencies, own post‑release outcomes by monitoring adoption, investigating quality issues and using telemetry and user feedback to iterate. Improving responsiveness and reliability through profiling, debugging and automated testing, you will also strengthen the tooling that lets the team ship confidently. Public design discussions, community issue triage and close collaboration with extension authors are part of the workflow, as is mentoring engineers and guiding decisions through constructive code reviews. The position requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field together with at least four years of software‑engineering experience in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript or Python, or an equivalent background. You must be comfortable becoming productive in a large TypeScript and Rust codebase and have proven experience leading technical design and delivery for complex, multi‑contributor projects. Strong product and engineering judgment, the ability to turn ambiguous user problems into maintainable solutions, and excellent communication and cross‑team collaboration skills are essential. Alternative qualifications include a Master's degree with six‑plus years of experience or a Bachelor's degree with eight‑plus years of experience. Experience building interactive, high‑performance applications, designing APIs or reusable components, and improving products through direct user feedback, telemetry or experiments is highly valued. Familiarity with AI coding tools, insight into their impact on development workflows, and prior work on AI‑powered features or contributions to developer‑tool open‑source projects are considered nice‑to‑have assets. The team offers a collaborative environment where engineers grow by sharing knowledge and influencing a widely used developer platform. What the role asks for: - Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field - 4+ years of software engineering experience - Proficiency in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python - Ability to work in large TypeScript and Rust codebases - Experience leading technical design for complex multi‑contributor projects - Strong product and engineering judgment for ambiguous problems - Excellent communication and cross‑team collaboration skills - Master's Degree in Computer Science + 6+ years experience (alternative) - Bachelor's Degree + 8+ years experience (alternative) - Nice‑to‑have: experience building interactive, high‑performance applications - Nice‑to‑have: designing APIs, extension points, reusable components - Nice‑to‑have: improving products via user feedback, telemetry, experiments - Nice‑to‑have: familiarity with AI coding tools and workflow impact - Nice‑to‑have: building AI‑powered features or contributing to open‑source