Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Are you an accomplished engineer with a proven track record of leading high-scale engineering efforts and tackling critical security challenges in today’s digital world? Microsoft Security is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead a key subsystem within a groundbreaking, high-performance data platform for security data. In this role, you will drive technical strategy and feature development end-to-end, partnering across engineering, product, and security teams to deliver solutions at scale.

As organizations face increasing threats, regulatory demands, and increasingly complex digital environments, they need robust solutions to manage and secure vast amounts of data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments.

We are building an exabyte-scale data platform designed to help enterprises:

Ingest and normalize security data: Pre-integrate and standardize security data from diverse sources, enabling customers to manage security logs more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Answer critical security and governance questions: Provide greater insight and control across complex security environments, using advanced AI and machine learning to identify patterns, uncover threats, and support informed, real-time decision-making.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design, development, and delivery of a critical subsystem within this high-scale data platform. You will define technical strategy, solve complex engineering challenges, and work closely with product management, security experts, and partner engineering teams to align on requirements and deliver scalable, high-quality solutions.

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.

Responsibilities

Improve AI tools/practices across SDLC; own AI-generated assets and Responsible AI controls. Use Accelerate/SPACE/ESSP to improve AI-related processes, experiment with AI, and recommend adoption.

Create/mentor clear test strategy ensuring quality and preventing regressions, including security/negative testing. Lead gap coverage, fixes/removals, and suite speed/reliability/defect localization. Build testability into design, apply current test architectures, redesign untestable code, and use AI for test automation.

Lead architecture for complex products: explore design options, document trade-offs, recommend best, and author design proposals/docs. Own design decisions, integrate new technologies, and ensure performance, scalability, resiliency, DR, COGS, security, privacy, compliance. Coach juniors, use data analytics, and review cross-team designs.

Lead dependency identification/incorporation into design docs. Identify teams/technologies to leverage/support, understand upstream/downstream interactions, and ensure security, compliance, performance, reliability across the stack. Coordinate cross-team work, resolve ownership conflicts, and align delivery schedules.

Mentor teams to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, performant code meeting specs. Drive improvements in performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, cost; identifies best practices/patterns (GenAI, code organization, naming) and quality/stability metrics. Anticipate/escalate blockers, communicate timeline impact, lead mitigation.

Review product/test code for standards, coverage, fit; give timely reviews that coach engineers and accelerate delivery. Check diagnosability, reliability, testability, maintainability, security, compliance, best practices. Ensure automated source code analysis in build/development.

Lead feature-flag/flighting experiments, interpret results, decide next steps/ship. Drive experimentation metrics for customer value and collaborate with Data Science/PM partners on success/guardrail metrics.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline 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
• Other Requirements: 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:
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications

5+ years of experience with distributed systems delivering large-scale, secure, and resilient cloud services

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.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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 requesting accommodations.

Insights from previous hires

Top skills: Big Data, Automation, Algorithms, Experimental Physics, Docker, Data Analysis, Communication, Checks, CLI, C++

Common previous titles: Tech, Tech Support Engineer, Senior Embedded Software Engineer, Engineer Senior, Senior Security Researcher, Senior Data Engineer, Senior Scientist, Engineer, Principal Data Scientist, Security Researcher