Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d

About The Position

Security is a critical priority for customers facing digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and complex digital estates. Microsoft Security aims to make the world safer by reshaping security and empowering users, customers, and developers with end-to-end, simplified security solutions. The Microsoft Security organization drives the company's mission to secure digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in diverse customer environments, as well as its own internal estate. The culture emphasizes a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams to bring their best daily to create life-changing innovations. The opportunity is within Conditional Access, the real-time Zero Trust policy engine central to Microsoft Entra ID, processing every sign-in, token, and agent request across Microsoft's identity platform. The role involves evolving Conditional Access from a human-centric access control layer into a universal policy engine for users, workloads, and AI agents. The Principal Engineer will own the technical vision for how Conditional Access scales to meet the next generation of identity, including autonomous agents, continuous authorization, data-plane enforcement, and policy portability. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and organization to achieve more, fostering a culture of inclusion built on respect, integrity, and accountability.

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.
• This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, high-performance runtime engines, or policy/rules engines operating at extreme scale
• Strong background in identity, authentication, authorization, or security infrastructure — you understand OAuth2/OIDC, token semantics, and Zero Trust principles
• Fluency in C# and large-scale .NET service development; experience with ESTS or equivalent identity platforms is a strong plus
• Architectural leadership
• Track record of defining and driving multi-year technical strategies that span teams and organizations
• Ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs between architectural purity and shipping velocity — you know when to invest in the long-term and when to ship the 80% solution
• Experience designing systems that evolve incrementally under production load with zero downtime

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture for Conditional Access at identity-platform scale
• Own the technical strategy for the CA evaluation engine — today processing millions of policy evaluations per second inside ESTS with sub-millisecond latency budgets
• Design the next-generation policy model: portable, data-driven policies that evaluate at token-time and at the data plane (GSA, MISE, resource providers)
• Drive convergence of token-time CA and Continuous Access Evaluation into a unified enforcement architecture
• Lead the CA-for-Agents technical vision
• Architect how CA evaluates agent identities as first-class actors — spanning OBO, S2S, CUA, and agentic chaining scenarios
• Drive cross-org technical alignment
• Partner with Identity Protection, Defender, Intune, Graph, GSA, and Azure networking to integrate risk signals, device posture, and network context into CA evaluation
• Represent CA engineering in cross-IDNA architecture reviews, security design reviews, and partner alignment forums
• Influence the ESTS roadmap for protocol-level changes required for agent governance (FIC, token exchange, CAE for OBO)
• Raise the engineering bar
• Set standards for safe rollout of policy evaluation changes in a Tier 0 service — feature flags, canary-first deployment, blast-radius analysis
• Drive testability and validation strategy: policy correctness proofs, synthetic tenant replay, and agent-driven test automation
• Mentor senior engineers across the CA and ESTS stack; build the technical bench for the team's next chapter
• Embody our Culture and Values

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees