Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft's mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers' heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate.

Are you passionate about building AI-powered solutions that help protect customers from evolving cybersecurity threats? Do you enjoy designing and developing intelligent, full-stack products that combine scalable cloud services, data platforms, and cutting-edge generative AI technologies? Are you energized by solving complex technical challenges in a collaborative, data-driven environment alongside software engineers, product managers, and security researchers? If so, we'd love to have you join our team.

The Defender Experts organization, part of Microsoft Security, is focused on helping customers strengthen their security posture through innovative, AI-powered experiences that combine advanced technology with human expertise. Our mission is to help customers detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats more effectively while protecting their digital assets at scale.

Our team is building next-generation security products and managed services for enterprise customers. We leverage large-scale cloud and data platforms, generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and agentic workflows to deliver intelligent, scalable solutions that enhance both customer and analyst experiences. Working closely with partners across Microsoft Security, we are driving innovation in a rapidly growing area of the business with opportunities to make significant impact.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the future of intelligent cybersecurity solutions within the Defender Experts organization.

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, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and deploy highly scalable real time data processing cloud services utilizing Azure services.

• Leverage state of the art AI technologies like Transformers Neural Networks, Embeddings, Vector stores, LLMs, and Agentic Workflows to solve challenging security problems.

• Help the team in all aspects of building cloud & AI-powered features from inception to productization to monitoring in production.

• Leads, inspires, and motivates engineering teams as a mentor and technical leader to create a culture where engineers thrive, grow, and innovate in a high-performance applications environment.

• Lead or participate in design reviews to evaluate technology options, review peer code for adherence to best practices, leverage AI in building software and contribute to and refine documentation to improve engineering efficiency.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate Security for AI and AI for Security, enhancing our threat detection and response capabilities.
• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required 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, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are 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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in cloud services or AI-powered systems.

• Experience building and shipping AI features for world-class production systems.

• Knowledge of machine learning tools and libraries like PyTorch or TensorFlow or similar.

• Hands-on experience in programming languages such C#, Java, C++, or equivalent programming languages.

#MSFTSecurity #scmjobs #scmred

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
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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.