Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d • $142,800 - $274,800

About The Position

Microsoft Security’s Agentic Security organization is building an Agent Platform for developing and operating secure, reliable, scalable, and efficient AI agents across security scenarios. The Principal Software Engineer will define the platform’s technical vision and architecture, drive foundational capabilities, and establish engineering patterns for production-grade agents. The role spans both developer and customer experiences, simplifying how agents are built and used while upholding security, reliability, performance, and operational standards.

The position involves turning emerging AI technologies and security requirements into robust, production-ready solutions at Microsoft scale. It also provides technical leadership across organizational boundaries, contributes directly to complex engineering work, identifies technology gaps, mentors engineers, and helps raise engineering standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and at least 6 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as 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

• Significant experience architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, developer platforms, or other mission-critical services, with deep understanding of reliability, scalability, security, performance, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across teams, drive complex architecture from concept to production, and influence engineering direction across organizational boundaries.
• Experience with AI/ML platforms, generative AI, LLM-based applications, agent frameworks, or AI infrastructure, including understanding of AI systems’ reliability, evaluation, security, and operational challenges.
• Understanding of cloud-native architecture and distributed systems, including containers, orchestration, service-to-service communication, identity, observability, and large-scale data systems.
• Experience designing developer platforms, APIs, SDKs, or extensible platform abstractions, with appreciation for developer productivity and platform usability.
• Product and customer mindset, with demonstrated ability to translate complex technical systems into simple, intuitive, high-quality user experiences.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the Agent Platform’s technical direction, including foundational capabilities, extensibility models, interfaces, and end-to-end system design.
• Design, build, and deliver large-scale systems that enable AI agents to operate securely, reliably, efficiently, and at scale, with isolation, identity and access controls, observability, resiliency, and operational safeguards.
• Establish and implement engineering patterns and standards for production-grade agents, including orchestration, tool integration, context and state management, evaluation, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Build platform capabilities and developer abstractions that simplify infrastructure complexity and enable teams to build, onboard, test, deploy, and operate agents consistently.
• Improve end-to-end user and developer experiences by simplifying complex workflows while maintaining security, reliability, performance, and operational standards.
• Partner with engineering, product, security, research, and platform teams to translate evolving AI technologies and security requirements into production-ready platform capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries, contribute to complex engineering problems, identify technology gaps, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards.
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.

What This Job Offers

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