Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

AI agents are rapidly becoming foundational across industries, transforming how organizations automate workflows, make decisions, and scale productivity. Unlike traditional prompt-based systems, modern agents can reason, plan, and take actions autonomously, unlocking powerful new business scenarios while introducing new challenges around security, governance, and control. Agent 365 is Microsoft’s unified control plane for AI agents, providing capabilities across agent registry, lifecycle management, access governance, observability, interoperability, and security. The Agent 365 Security team builds the experiences, services, and infrastructure that help organizations securely govern agents across their enterprise. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build modern, high-scale, inclusive end-to-end experiences that empower administrators to effectively manage agent security, policies, and tools. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex distributed-system and product problems, building intuitive and performant user experiences, and collaborating across engineering, product, design, research, and partner teams. In this role, you will work across the stack, with a balanced focus on front-end and back-end engineering. You will drive architecture and technical direction, design and build scalable services and experiences, and lead features from concept through production. Your work will shape how organizations securely operate and govern AI agents in enterprise environments, enabling intelligent workflows, actionable insights, and seamless integrations at scale. As a Principal engineer, you will also help establish engineering patterns and architectural direction, influence investments across team boundaries, mentor engineers, and partner with stakeholders across Microsoft to solve emerging security and governance challenges in the rapidly evolving agent ecosystem. 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.
• 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.
• Hands-on experience building and delivering LLM-powered applications or agents that use tools and execute multi-step workflows, beyond personal use of AI coding assistants.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals, including hands-on coding, debugging, and automated testing, with sound judgment about abstractions, interfaces, and maintainability.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems or cloud services, including state management, observability, security, reliability.
• Demonstrated principal-level technical leadership across teams, including shaping architecture, aligning delivery, influencing decisions without direct authority, and mentoring engineers through hands-on work.
• Experience building Security for AI solutions

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and design of scalable AI infrastructure, setting technical direction for complex, large-scale systems.
• Define and drive end-to-end architecture for Agent Security, Policy, and Tool Governance, solving complex and ambiguous engineering problems across organizational boundaries.
• Establish technical strategy and engineering frameworks for experimentation and evaluation.
• Define success criteria and lead analysis of experimentation scorecards, translating results into engineering priorities and product improvements.
• Partner closely with Product Managers and engineering leaders to define scenarios, datasets, evaluation methodologies, and measurable success criteria.
• Lead data acquisition and evaluation-data strategy, establishing standards for data quality, formatting, accuracy, governance, and reuse.
• Provide technical leadership across teams, driving architectural alignment, influencing engineering investments, and raising engineering quality.
• Identify systemic technical risks and opportunities and drive solutions that improve scalability, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.

Benefits

• The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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
• 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.

What This Job Offers

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