Principal Software Architect

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

18h

About The Position

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 service-to-service authentication team provides the backbone that secures all non-human communication at Microsoft, spanning both Microsoft-internal services and customer-owned workloads and authenticating billions of transactions per hour. We build and operate Azure managed identity, secure token issuance, and backup authentication systems that power everything from core Azure infrastructure to critical customer workloads and AI agents. Alongside operating at massive scale, the team designs and delivers new authentication protocols and advanced security capabilities to meet evolving threat models and platform needs. As a foundational dependency of the cloud and a prime target for sophisticated threat actors, we engineer every capability with an uncompromising focus on security, resilience, and reliability. We are looking to hire a Principal Software Architect with deep technical judgment and platform‑level ownership to shape the future of managed identity and service‑to‑service authentication at scale.

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• 6+ years of experience designing and implementing features of high-scale distributed cloud services
• 3+ years of experience as an architect or technical lead, driving strategic decisions and delivering high-impact technical results

Responsibilities

• Define and own the long‑term technical strategy and architectural vision for managed identity and service‑to‑service authentication, aligning that vision with organizational goals and communicating it effectively to senior leadership and other stakeholders
• Translate long‑term strategy into actionable shorter-term execution plans by driving technical and organizational consensus across multiple engineering teams, partner organizations, customers, and leadership, and ensuring successful delivery.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across teams delivering security‑ and resilience‑critical capabilities, setting architectural direction and raising the bar on quality through design leadership, code reviews, and direct hands-on technical engagement
• Own and drive engineering fundamentals at the platform level, shaping investment priorities and proactively identifying and addressing systemic risks related to performance, scale, resilience, testability, and security across the organization
• Lead innovation in the application of AI by defining strategy and guiding adoption of AI‑driven tools to improve engineering productivity, while also shaping and delivering AI agents that automate operational and engineering workflows at scale
• Own live‑site excellence for the platform by serving as an organizational incident manager during high‑severity production events, and by engaging deeply in the pre-mortem and post-mortem processes to drive durable learnings and systemic fixes across multiple services

What This Job Offers

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