Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

13d

About The Position

The Defender Experts Team within Microsoft Security is building AI-powered cybersecurity experiences to help customers detect, investigate, and respond to sophisticated cyber threats using security expertise, scalable cloud services, generative AI, and agentic workflows. The Principal Software Engineer will design and build full-stack capabilities across cloud-scale backend services, APIs, large-scale security data, and AI-powered experiences, including LLM-based agents and autonomous workflows. The role addresses complex engineering challenges involving distributed systems, cybersecurity, and generative AI, and helps shape product architecture and technical direction. The engineer will collaborate with software engineers, product managers, security researchers, and partner teams across Microsoft Security to translate complex security scenarios into reliable, scalable, intuitive customer experiences. The position offers opportunities to influence technical design, mentor engineers, and establish engineering patterns for secure, production-ready AI capabilities. The team emphasizes learning, experimentation, collaboration, and solving ambiguous technical problems at cloud scale.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C#, Java, or C++, 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.
5+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and delivering high-quality production software.
3+ years of experience building cloud services, distributed systems, or AI-powered systems, including designing and operating scalable production services.
Experience building and shipping AI-powered features in production using technologies such as large language models, machine learning models, or embeddings.
Experience with machine learning frameworks and libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or equivalent technologies.
Experience collaborating across engineering, product, and other technical disciplines to design and deliver complex software solutions.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C#, Java, or C++, or equivalent experience.
Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages including C#, Java, or C++, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate highly scalable, real-time cloud services and data-processing systems using Azure technologies to improve security analyst workflows.
Develop AI-powered security capabilities using transformer-based models, embeddings, vector stores, large language models, and agentic workflows.
Own features end to end, from architecture and design through implementation, productization, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement in production.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, establish engineering practices, and foster a collaborative environment.
Lead and participate in architecture, design, and code reviews; evaluate technical approaches; apply AI-assisted software engineering practices; and improve documentation, tooling, and development practices.
Collaborate across engineering, product, and security disciplines to build capabilities for Security for AI and AI for Security, improving threat detection, investigation, and response experiences.
Embody Microsoft's culture and values.