Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

4d•$142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft 365 (M365) Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud (IC3) is the platform powering billions of real-time customer conversations across Teams, Skype, Dynamics, and third-party solutions. The platform ensures reliable and high-quality messaging, meeting, and audio/video calling services. IC3 Policies and settings are crucial for driving adoption and revenue of Teams, with a hyper-scale platform serving 75 unique policies and resulting in 3 billion runtime resolutions per day. The AEGIS team within IC3 Security Engineering is creating a future where intelligent systems automatically protect and remediate security risks across hundreds of services. This involves centralizing security operations, empowering service owners, and using AI to transform risk mitigation into a proactive, scalable, and efficient process. As a Principal Software Engineer in the AEGIS team, you will design and build the AI-driven platform that powers centralized security automation and risk remediation. You will develop intelligent services that understand complex security requirements, evaluate service posture, and orchestrate automated fixes across IC3. This role offers an opportunity for technical and career growth, deep expertise in large-scale cloud and security systems, and the chance to leverage cutting-edge AI to solve real-world challenges in security automation. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, driven by values of respect, integrity, and accountability, fostering a culture of inclusion.

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.
Must pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages (such as C#, Python, Go, or Java) with experience in building distributed systems or cloud services.
Experience with service-oriented architecture, microservices, or large-scale cloud systems (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP).
Demonstrated understanding of secure coding practices, authentication, authorization, and service security fundamentals.
Experience developing or integrating with AI/ML or automation frameworks to optimize workflows, detect issues, or enable intelligent decision-making.
Solid problem-solving and system design skills, with the ability to translate complex security or compliance requirements into practical, automated solutions.
Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code for managing large-scale deployments.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills — able to work effectively with cross-functional partners, influence without authority, and drive alignment across teams.
Growth mindset with a passion for learning new technologies, especially AI-assisted development and cloud security tooling.
Experience as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) or similar operational role, ensuring high service availability and reliability.
Hyper scale distributed systems.
Cyber security analysis and threat modeling.
Agentic programming and LLM.

Responsibilities

Collaborates with appropriate stakeholders to determine user requirements for a scenario.
Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service, or platform.
Creates, implements, optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to establish and improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI).
Leverages subject-matter expertise of product features and partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive a workgroup's project plans, release plans, and work items.
Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) and guides other engineers by developing and following the playbook, working on call to monitor system/product/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions, alerting stakeholders about status and initiates actions to restore system/product/service for simple and complex problems when appropriate.
Proactively seeks new knowledge and adapts to new trends, technical solutions, and patterns that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale.