Principal Software Engineering Manager - Microsoft Red Team

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

7d • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

The CISO organization represents customer and executive security-buyer perspectives, focusing on enterprise security strategy, risk posture, and real-world security needs. The Microsoft Red Team continually attacks Microsoft services to identify systemic risks and works with engineering, investigation, and incident response teams to improve defenses.

Within Microsoft Red Team Engineering, the Intelligence team builds reconnaissance, data, and attack-graph capabilities that help human operators and autonomous agents understand complex environments. It combines signals from Microsoft and external environments, models identities, assets, relationships, exposures, and likely attack paths, and converts fragmented data into actionable intelligence packages.

As Principal Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Red Team Intelligence, you will lead and grow the engineering team responsible for this intelligence platform. You will own the technical strategy and delivery of services and skills used by human operators and agentic systems, working with red team operators, security researchers, data scientists, and engineering teams across geographies. The goal is to help the team understand environments, identify important attack paths, and act before real adversaries do.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field 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

• Experience with offensive security, such as red teaming, penetration testing, malware or tooling development, or offensive cyber operations.
• Experience with applications leveraging LLMs or autonomous agents, through hands-on work or leading teams that build them; examples include agentic architectures, prompt engineering, evaluation, and integrating generative AI into production or research systems.
• Experience leading teams through growth or charter expansion and developing engineers into senior and principal contributors.
• Familiarity with the modern attacker kill chain, MITRE ATT&CK, and adversary tradecraft against cloud and AI environments.
• 10+ years of professional hands-on software development experience and a track record of shipping and operating production systems.
• 3+ years of people management experience leading software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Experience building software in cybersecurity, such as red team or offensive tooling, endpoint or cloud security products, detection and response, threat protection, or adjacent security engineering.
• Ability to set direction in ambiguous, unsolved problem spaces and translate strategy into execution with measurable impact.
• Excellent cross-functional and cross-geography collaboration skills, with the ability to influence operators, researchers, and partner engineering teams without authority.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and coach a team of software engineers, building an inclusive, high-trust culture.
• Own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for the intelligence pillar within Microsoft Red Team Engineering, and expand the team's charter into new offensive capability areas as opportunities emerge.
• Drive the design and delivery of AI-driven services using LLMs and autonomous agents to find critical attack paths across Microsoft's estate at scale.
• Deliver intelligence packages and product experiences that help human red team operators understand target environments, plan operations, and select high-impact techniques.
• Contribute engineering leadership to the broader AI-driven adversary emulation platform, partnering with peer engineering teams globally on architecture and shared components.
• Partner with red team operators, security researchers, product management, and engineering leaders globally to align investments with high-impact attack paths.
• Hire, develop, and retain engineers; set expectations, provide candid feedback, and develop future technical leaders.
• Drive engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality, secure development practices, live-site health, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure Microsoft continues to improve security through authentic red team attacks.

What This Job Offers

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