Principal Software Engineer

Job description

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 excited about building capabilities that help protect our customers from cybersecurity threats.

Making security incident detection and investigation autonomous Do you enjoy designing & building full-stack products using technologies ranging from backend services and APIs for optimized data retrieval and business logic, to LLM-based agentic workflows Do you thrive in a collaborative and data-driven environment Do you enjoy working with talented feature teams including software engineers, product managers, and security researchers If so, you'll love our collaborative, agile, and fun group with a startup mindset.

We are hiring a **Principal Software Engineer** .

As are part of the **Defender Experts product unit (part of Microsoft’s Security division) o** ur mission is to help protect our customers with innovative AI-powered & full-stack capabilities, combined with human-powered intelligence.

We are committed to defending Microsoft customers from cyber-attacks as well as providing sophisticated capabilities to protect their digital assets.

Making our customers succeed with our solutions is what excites us every day! We are a diverse group with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, prior work & life experiences.

We foster a strong culture of learning & a collaborative work environment.

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**

1.

Design, implement and deploy highly scalable real time data processing cloud services utilizing Azure services.
2.

Leverage state of the art AI technologies like Transformers Neural Networks, Embeddings, Vector stores, LLMs, and Agentic Workflows to solve challenging security problems.
3.

Help the team in all aspects of building cloud & AI-powered features from inception to productization to monitoring in production.
4.

Lead, inspire, and motivate engineering teams as a mentor and technical leader to create a culture where engineers thrive, grow, and innovate in a high-performance environment.
5.

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.
6.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate Security for AI and AI for Security, enhancing our threat detection and response capabilities.
7.

Embody our culture and values

**Qualifications**

**Required/Minimum Qualification** **:**

+ 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.
+ 6+ years of industry-experience building/delivering high-quality software.

**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.

**Preferred Qualifications:**

+ 5+ years of experience in cloud services or AI systems.
+ 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 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
+ 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.
+ Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate within a multi-disciplinary team.

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: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 25th, 2025.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.

Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .

Required Skill Profession

Other General