Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

6d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft Security is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead a key subsystem within a high-performance, exabyte-scale data platform for security data. The platform is designed to help enterprises manage security data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments by ingesting and normalizing data from diverse sources and providing insight into security and governance through AI and machine learning.

The engineer will lead the design, development, and delivery of a critical subsystem; define technical strategy; solve complex engineering challenges; and partner with product management, security experts, and engineering teams to align on requirements and deliver scalable, high-quality solutions. The role also leads architecture and cross-team dependency coordination, mentors engineers, improves software quality and testing, and guides experimentation and adoption of AI tools and practices across the software development lifecycle.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, 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

• 5+ years of experience with distributed systems delivering large-scale, secure, and resilient cloud services.

Responsibilities

• Improve AI tools and practices across the software development lifecycle; own AI-generated assets and Responsible AI controls; use engineering metrics and experimentation to recommend AI adoption.
• Create and mentor a clear test strategy that ensures quality and prevents regressions, including security and negative testing. Lead test-coverage gap resolution, suite speed and reliability improvements, defect localization, testability in design, and AI-assisted test automation.
• Lead architecture for complex products by exploring design options, documenting trade-offs, recommending approaches, authoring design proposals, owning design decisions, and integrating new technologies. Ensure performance, scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, cost of goods sold, security, privacy, and compliance.
• Lead identification and incorporation of dependencies into design documents. Identify teams and technologies to leverage or support, understand upstream and downstream interactions, ensure quality across the stack, coordinate cross-team work, resolve ownership conflicts, and align delivery schedules.
• Mentor teams in producing extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, performant code that meets specifications. Drive improvements in performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost; identify best practices and quality and stability metrics; anticipate blockers and lead mitigation.
• Review product and test code for standards, coverage, and suitability. Provide timely reviews that coach engineers and accelerate delivery, checking diagnosability, reliability, testability, maintainability, security, compliance, and best practices. Ensure automated source-code analysis in build and development workflows.
• Lead feature-flag and flighting experiments, interpret results, and decide next steps or whether to ship. Drive experimentation metrics for customer value and collaborate with Data Science and Product Management partners on success and guardrail metrics.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the linked Microsoft careers page.

What This Job Offers

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