Principal Software Engineering Manager - Microsoft Red Team

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

The Principal Software Engineering Manager will lead and grow the engineering team responsible for Microsoft Red Team Intelligence, a foundational intelligence platform within Microsoft Red Team Engineering. The team builds reconnaissance, data, and attack-graph capabilities that help human operators and autonomous agents understand complex environments, model identities, assets, relationships, exposures, and likely attack paths, and convert fragmented data into actionable intelligence packages. This work enables high-confidence attack planning as part of Microsoft Red Team’s AI-driven adversary emulation platform. The role owns the technical strategy and delivery of services and capabilities used by human operators and agentic systems. It works closely with red team operators, security researchers, data scientists, product management, and engineering teams across geographies to help Microsoft rapidly understand environments, identify significant attack paths, and improve security through authentic red team attacks. The manager also develops engineers and technical leaders, supports engineering excellence, and contributes to the broader adversary emulation platform. Microsoft’s CISO organization represents the voice of the customer and executive security buyer, focusing on enterprise security strategy, risk posture, and real-world security needs. Microsoft Red Team continually attacks Microsoft services to identify systemic risks and works with engineering teams, investigators, and incident responders to improve protection, detection, investigation, and response.

Requirements

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

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; familiarity with agentic architectures, prompt engineering, evaluation, or 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.
Demonstrated 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, including influencing operators, researchers, and partner engineering teams without authority.

Responsibilities

Lead, grow, and coach a team of software engineers, fostering 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 that use LLMs and autonomous agents to find critical attack paths across Microsoft's estate at scale.
Deliver intelligence packages and product experiences that help red team operators understand target environments, plan operations, and select high-impact techniques.
Contribute engineering leadership to the broader AI-driven adversary emulation platform and partner 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.