Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

5d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

As a Security Software Engineer on the Copilot Security Team, this senior-level technical leadership role designs, builds, and governs security-critical software systems that protect Microsoft’s agentic and autonomous AI experiences at scale. The role spans the Copilot security lifecycle, from threat discovery and architectural design through mitigation engineering, production integration, and continuous validation. It combines hands-on engineering with system-level security thinking to deliver durable, reusable security defenses and secure-by-design architecture across Copilot products and integrations. Success is measured by risk reduction, platform resilience, and the long-term sustainability of Copilot’s security posture.

The position focuses on production-scale machine-learning systems and defenses for threats such as prompt injection, adversarial inputs, and agentic workflow abuse. It includes adaptive detection and policy models, AI security evaluation, integration of ML defenses into orchestration frameworks, and ongoing analysis of telemetry and security outcomes. The engineer collaborates across Microsoft product, privacy, security, and AI platform teams, shares applied security practices, and participates in on-call engineering duties.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 4+ 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

• Master’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 a bachelor’s degree in the field and 8+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production security-critical software systems, with responsibility for correctness, availability, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience threat modeling complex distributed systems and driving mitigations from design through production deployment.
• Experience identifying, analyzing, and remediating security vulnerabilities with security response, red-team, or incident-response partners.
• Experience building or contributing to production security defenses such as enforcement layers, guardrails, detection, monitoring, or evaluation tooling.
• Experience with distributed systems, including service-to-service communication, identity, authorization, telemetry, and failure isolation.
• Experience serving as a technical lead or architectural reviewer for security-sensitive systems across multiple services or teams.
• Experience conducting vulnerability research, red teaming, or adversarial testing, including identifying novel or emerging attack classes.
• Experience participating in or leading incident response and post-incident analysis, and translating incidents into durable, reusable security improvements.
• Experience designing reusable, platform-level security solutions that eliminate vulnerability classes rather than addressing one-off issues.
• Experience establishing or operating risk management frameworks, including maintaining risk registries, defining mitigation priorities, and tracking measurable risk reduction.
• Experience building or operating security metrics, dashboards, or evaluation pipelines that demonstrate real-world security impact.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers through design reviews, threat-model coaching, or architectural guidance.
• Experience securing AI-driven, agentic, or tool-invoking systems, including prompt-based architectures or orchestration layers.
• Experience communicating security architecture decisions and tradeoffs to engineering leadership, PM/TPM, and executive stakeholders.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-evolving security environments, particularly those involving autonomous or generative AI systems.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate production-scale ML systems that protect Copilot experiences, with high reliability, performance, and security at global scale.
• Develop adaptive detection and policy models that learn from evolving attacker behavior and protect against emerging AI security threats.
• Build and own AI security evaluation frameworks, including adversarial testing, red-team support, and continuous robustness measurement across real Copilot scenarios.
• Define success metrics and conduct experiments to quantify security effectiveness, adversarial robustness, precision/recall tradeoffs, and user experience impact.
• Partner with security and engineering teams to integrate ML defenses into secure orchestration frameworks governing agent delegation, tool calling, and action execution.
• Monitor and analyze telemetry to improve model performance, reduce false positives and negatives, and guide iterative defense improvements.
• Collaborate with product, privacy, and AI platform teams to establish agentic security patterns across the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem.
• Document and share applied ML security techniques and help establish best practices for secure agentic AI across Microsoft.
• Perform on-call engineering duties.

What This Job Offers

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