Principal Software Engineer, AI

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. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

The NL2KQL (Natural Language to Kusto Query Language) team builds AI powered capabilities that enable security practitioners to express investigative intent in natural language and translate it into precise, executable KQL queries. Our work sits at the intersection of rigorous software engineering, applied machine learning, large language models, and security analytics, powering critical experiences across Security Copilot and Microsoft security products. The team's mission is to significantly improve analyst productivity, lower the barrier to advanced threat hunting, and enable scalable, reliable natural language interaction with large and complex security datasets used in real world defense scenarios. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer, AI to play a technical leadership role in shaping and building the next generation of AI agents and Security Copilot skills. In this role, you will define technical direction for high impact systems, lead complex cross team initiatives, and drive end to end execution of AI capabilities that operate at Microsoft scale and directly influence how security analysts detect, investigate, and respond to threats. You are expected to set engineering standards, make durable architectural decisions, mentor senior engineers, and deliver solutions whose impact spans multiple products and organizations, with clear customer and business outcomes.

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

• Leads by example within the team by producing extensible and maintainable code.
• Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents. For areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members, drives coordination and communicates across teams and resolves conflicts between teams.
• Leads discussions for the architecture of products/solutions and creates proposals for architecture.
• Innovation through experimentation: Initiate and guide experiments to evaluate new technologies and determine best-fit solutions.
• Support Data Scientists and research members in the team by offering rigid engineering environment to innovate, fail fast and deliver quickly.
• Develop scalable, high-quality solutions: Build software that is reliable, maintainable, and scalable to meet evolving business needs.
• Support and Develop Others: Mentor team members, encourage inclusive engineering practices, and contribute to building a diverse and talented workforce aligned with our mission.
• Embed operational excellence: Incorporate live site readiness, monitoring, and incident response into the development lifecycle.
• AI first development: Employ AI for development cycle, embracing non-deterministic nature of AI products with evals and experimentation

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.

Other Requirements

• Candidates must be able 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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

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.
• 6+ years of experience designing, developing, or maintaining secure software systems, with applied knowledge of authentication, data protection, access control, and secure coding practices
• 6+ years of experience with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or comparable environments, including building and operating scalable, highly available services and systems.
• Experience building and deploying machine learning or large language model (LLM) applications at scale.
• Experience building and deploying large scale distributed systems.

#MSFTSecurity #SCEM #SecurityCopilot

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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.