Principal Software Engineer

<b>Overview</b><br><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif;">Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.</span></p><p> </p><p>The Agentic Security organization is building the next generation of intelligent agent experiences for Microsoft Security. Our team is developing an Agent Platform that enables teams to build and operate secure, reliable, scalable, and efficient AI agents across a broad range of security scenarios. We are looking for a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to help define the technical vision and architecture for this platform. This role will drive foundational platform capabilities, establish engineering patterns for building production-grade agents, and work across teams to turn emerging AI technologies into robust solutions at Microsoft scale. Because the platform will serve both developers building agents and customers using agent-powered experiences, the architect will also play a critical role in simplifying the developer and user experience while maintaining effective security, reliability, performance, and operational standards.</p><p><br><br>Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.</p><br><br><b>Responsibilities</b><br><ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li><div>Define and drive the technical direction for the Agent Platform, including foundational capabilities, extensibility models, interfaces, and end-to-end system design.</div></li><li><div>Design, build, and deliver large-scale systems that enable AI agents to operate securely, reliably, efficiently, and at scale, with isolation, identity and access controls, observability, resiliency, and operational safeguards.</div></li><li><div>Establish and implement engineering patterns and standards for building and operating production-grade agents, including agent orchestration, tool integration, context and state management, evaluation, monitoring, and lifecycle management.</div></li><li><div>Build platform capabilities and developer abstractions that simplify underlying infrastructure complexity and enable teams to build, onboard, test, deploy, and operate agents easily and consistently.</div></li><li><div>Drive end-to-end user and developer experience improvements, identifying opportunities to simplify complex workflows while maintaining effective security, reliability, performance, and operational standards.</div></li><li><div>Partner closely with engineering, product, security, research, and other platform teams to translate rapidly evolving AI technologies and security requirements into production-ready platform capabilities.</div></li><li><div>Provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries, contribute directly to complex engineering problems, identify technology gaps, mentor engineers, and raise the engineering bar across the organization.</div></li><li>Embody our <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/about/corporate-values" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Culture </a>and <a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/culture" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Values</a></li></ul><div> </div><br><br><b>Qualifications</b><br><p><strong>Required Qualifications:</strong></p><ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li><div>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.</div><div> </div></li></ul><p> </p><p><strong>Other Requirements: </strong></p><p>Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: </p><ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li><strong>Microsoft Cloud Background Check:</strong> This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. </li></ul><p> </p><p> </p><p><strong>Preferred qualifications:</strong></p><ul><li>Significant experience architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, developer platforms, or other mission-critical services, with deep understanding of reliability, scalability, security, performance, and operational excellence. </li><li>Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across teams, drive complex architecture from concept to production, and influence engineering direction across organizational boundaries.</li><li>Experience with AI/ML platforms, generative AI, LLM-based applications, agent frameworks, or AI infrastructure, including an understanding of the unique reliability, evaluation, security, and operational challenges of AI systems.</li><li>Understanding of cloud-native architecture and distributed systems, including containers, orchestration, service-to-service communication, identity, observability, and large-scale data systems.</li><li>Experience designing developer platforms, APIs, SDKs, or extensible platform abstractions, with appreciation for developer productivity and platform usability. </li><li>Product and customer mindset, with demonstrated ability to translate complex technical systems into simple, intuitive, and high-quality user experiences.</li></ul><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif;">#MSFTSecurity</span></p> <br><br><p>Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year. </p><p></p> <p>Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:<br><a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay">https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay</a></p><br><p>This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.</p><br><hr><br><p>Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about <a href="https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html"><b><u>requesting accommodations.</u></b></a></p>