Principal Software Engineer - Backend - Architecture & Design

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

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. We are looking for a senior applied scientist to join and shape the research and product roadmap for the team in this space. On the Microsoft Defender for Office team (MDO), we are responsible for delivering a cloud-based email and message filtering service that protects customers from advanced threats (malware, phish, fraud and spam) in Microsoft’s email and Teams collaboration workloads. MDO provides investigation, threat hunting and remediation capabilities that allow security teams to efficiently identify, prioritize, investigate, and respond to threats. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer - Backend - Architecture & Design, who can design, develop, and operate highly reliable, low-latency, cloud-scale services that deliver effective and scalable protection to Microsoft Teams customers through Microsoft Defender for Office 365, including AI-assisted detection and response experiences. You will lead architecture and design across multiple engineering organizations, partnering closely with product managers, architects, and security stakeholders to define requirements, drive technical decisions, and deliver high-quality, measurable outcomes. You will set engineering direction for complex, ambiguous problem spaces, establish operational excellence (availability, latency, resiliency, and cost), and ensure the service meets security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI expectations (e.g., AI driven automations and protection scenarios) 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.

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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

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.
Experience with solving large scale problems that require alignment and work across various teams within the organization / company.
6+ years programming in C, Java, Go, or Python.
6+ years designing/building/operating scalable cloud services or distributed systems (Azure/AWS/GCP) with production ownership + CI/CD integration.
6+ years applying distributed systems concepts (concurrency, conflict resolution, consensus) to build resilient back-end architectures.
6+ years delivering reliable, durable, efficient systems (live site ops, incident response, performance optimization).
6+ years programming in C, Java, Go, or Python.
6+ years designing/developing secure software systems (authentication, data protection, access control, secure coding).

Responsibilities

Design, implement and test features and functionality in our Microsoft Defender for Office to ensure M365 customers have all the capabilities they need to protect their users on Microsoft teams.
Infuse Artificial intelligence capabilities to the product design and work across the company to build a capacity and utilization plan for GPUs
Adhere to great Safe Deployment Practices (pre-production testing, blast radius reduction, early detection of issues and rollback of changes).
Work across geographic and organizational boundaries to define requirements, scope work, develop features, integrate functionality, and meet key performance goals.
Hands-on engineer who delivers high quality code that is maintainable, performant, testable and used in cross products
Conduct efficient design and architectural discussions, ensuring that solutions are secure, reliable, maintainable, and highly performant. Lead and facilitate technical discussions, encouraging contributions from all team members and fostering an inclusive environment where ideas can be shared without judgment.
Collaborate closely with multiple partner teams to ensure seamless integration and delivery of complex projects.
Drive effective project management and delivery within a dynamic, results-oriented environment.
Embody our culture and values

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