Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
The Policy and Configuration team builds shared deployment and policy capabilities that help Microsoft Security services ship safely across Azure, regions, and sovereign clouds. The Principal Software Engineer will set technical direction for this control plane, partner across Microsoft Security and Azure, and turn complex deployment requirements into secure, self-service developer experiences. The work aims to reduce dependence on proprietary tools and create reusable platform patterns that can scale from Defender to Microsoft. The role defines the next generation of deployment configuration and policy for Microsoft Security. It works across Microsoft Security, Azure, and partner platforms to make secure deployment self-service, reliable, and eventually invisible to service teams. The engineer will shape Azure-native security offerings, influence platform roadmaps, and replace legacy deployment patterns with a smaller, safer control plane.
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 Background Check and Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice To Haves
- Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and at least 8 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and at least 12 years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
- At least 3 years of experience building cloud-native applications or platform services on Azure using C# and modern .NET.
- Experience designing policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, developer tooling, or deployment systems used by multiple engineering teams.
- Experience leading technical partnerships across two or more teams, such as Azure, .NET, security, compliance, or service engineering.
Responsibilities
- Define the architecture and migration path from proprietary tools to standard .NET Aspire and Azure platform capabilities, supporting Defender and Microsoft Security initially and Microsoft more broadly over time.
- Translate deployment, compliance, and security requirements into typed APIs, analyzers, and build gates, moving data residency, rollout, and configuration failures from deployment time to authoring time.
- Improve service-team experience through clear diagnostics, safe upgrade paths, and self-service workflows, using support demand and adoption data to remove recurring friction.
- Build production-quality control-plane capabilities with clear ownership, strong test strategy, secure defaults, and zero-touch deployment where possible.
- Drive technical agreements with .NET, Azure, CISO, and service-team partners; resolve dependency boundaries and ensure end-to-end security, compliance, and operational readiness before release.
- Lead design reviews, incident learning, and reusable engineering practices across teams.
- Grow shared capability in modern cloud development and AI-assisted engineering.
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; further information is available through the provided Microsoft pay and benefits link.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
