Principal Security Engineer - Red Agent Team

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Security Engineer for the Red Agents team within Perception, an advanced AI platform for security and IT teams. The team builds autonomous, AI-powered offensive security agents that continuously emulate real-world adversaries. The role leads the development of secure, reliable, and safe agentic red-teaming capabilities at enterprise scale, setting technical direction and execution strategy for multi-agent systems that combine generative AI, reasoning, memory, planning, and security expertise under strict safety, authorization, and scope guardrails. The engineer partners with Product, Applied Science, Responsible AI, and Microsoft internal red teams to translate adversary tradecraft and industry frameworks into customer-ready agent capabilities, while driving engineering excellence in architecture, service health, compliance, and security hygiene. The role also requires navigating ambiguity across organizational boundaries to deliver trustworthy AI-driven security experiences.

Microsoft describes its mission as empowering every person and organization to achieve more, and emphasizes growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

• Master's degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or a related field and 4+ years of experience in security or a related field; or bachelor's degree in one of those fields and 6+ years of relevant experience; or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building generative AI or agentic systems, including LLM orchestration, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, and safety guardrails.
• Background in offensive security, red teaming, penetration testing, or adversary emulation, including familiarity with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
• Understanding of identity and authorization concepts such as least privilege, role-based access control (RBAC), delegated access, and multi-tenant isolation, especially for autonomous or AI-driven systems.
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, align across teams and organizations, and clearly communicate technical tradeoffs and risks to engineering and leadership audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and long-term technical strategy for the Red Agents portfolio; facilitate cross-team collaboration, identify dependencies, and resolve technical and organizational challenges across teams and services.
• Drive the engineering roadmap in alignment with product goals, prioritizing investments and adopting technologies and approaches that provide meaningful value.
• Guide architectural and technical decisions, balancing scalability, security, reliability, maintainability, and delivery velocity.
• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development to enable rapid iteration and data-informed decisions.
• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, testing, and standardization across development, deployment, and operations.
• Own operational excellence and reliability practices, including SLOs, incident response, and capacity planning, and ensure post-incident learnings lead to systemic improvements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal