Senior Software Engineer - Backend

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.

PRISMA Fabric team builds the shared platform foundations for data, models, inference, and agent execution that power AI-first security research across the Microsoft Defender ecosystem. Our work enables secure, scalable, and compliant human-led, agent-assisted research and experimentation, and forms the backbone of next-generation security intelligence at Microsoft.

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own foundational platform services for data access platform, model execution, machine learning inference, and agent orchestration that are reused across the Microsoft Defender ecosystem
• Lead the implementation of medium-to-large, scoped features and components, making sound architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability
• Collaborate closely with research, security, and product engineering teams to translate research needs into robust, reusable platform abstractions, rather than one-off solutions.
• Drive end-to-end ownership of services, including design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and live-site operations.
• Identify and address systemic platform gaps by consolidating shared capabilities and reducing fragmented or bespoke infrastructure across teams.
• Contribute to platform standards and best practices for API design, service reliability, observability, and operational excellence
• Participate actively in design and code reviews, raising the overall engineering quality and bar for platform development
• Mentor and support other engineers through technical guidance, knowledge sharing, and example-setting, without direct people management responsibility.
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve performance, cost efficiency, security, and compliance across the fabric.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ 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

• 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 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 6+ 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 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems or platform services.
• Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages (such as C++, C, Java, or Python).
• Experience designing APIs, services, or frameworks intended for reuse by multiple teams or systems
• Solid understanding of system reliability, performance, scalability, security, and operational excellence in large-scale environments
• Demonstrated ability to work independently on complex problems and deliver end-to-end solutions, from design through production and live-site operation.
• Effective communication skills and the ability to collaborate across engineering, research, and product teams.
• Experience with data platforms, machine learning systems, or ML inference services.
• Familiarity with agent-based systems, workflow engines, or orchestration frameworks.
• Experience building platforms where security, compliance, and governance are first-class design requirements.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-scale systems (e.g., Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform).
• Experience influencing technical design decisions beyond an immediate team or feature area.
• Interest in building foundational infrastructure that enables AI-driven security research and intelligence at scale.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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.