Principal AI Software Engineer

Overview

We are building the future of security posture and exposure management at Microsoft, protecting millions of enterprise customers across cloud, device, identity, data, and AI workloads. Our team is shifting from legacy dashboard experiences to AI-native, agentic security that drives risk reduction at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer at the intersection of AI/ML and security. You will drive the architecture and delivery of autonomous agentic experiences that investigate, triage, remediate, and harden customer environments using LLMs, knowledge graphs, and the Microsoft Security Graph (MSG).

This is a high-impact IC role reporting to the Exposure Management engineering leadership. You will influence strategy, mentor senior engineers, and ship production systems used by the largest enterprises in the world.

Security is entering its agentic era. Legacy dashboards and manual triage cannot keep pace with AI-powered threats. Microsoft protects more enterprise surface area than any other vendor, 65M+ devices, 3 clouds, 750M+ identities, and 78T daily signals.

You will architect AI systems that turn this data into autonomous action, agents that find what matters, explain why it matters, and fix it in minutes, not months.

Responsibilities

Architect & Build Agentic Security Experiences

• Design and implement Blue (investigate/triage), Green (remediate/harden), and Red (attack simulation) agents operating across customer environments
• Define agent architecture: planning, tool use (MCP skills), memory, context retrieval, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Build orchestration over the Microsoft Security Graph, correlating exposure signals across cloud, device, identity, data, and AI
  
  

Drive AI-Native Platform Design

• Architect skill, knowledge, context, and memory layers for agentic security systems
• Design MCP-based skill interfaces for customization and extensibility
• Define how LLMs interact safely and accurately with structured security data (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, attack paths, graph relationships)
  
  

Shape AI-for-Security Strategy

• Partner with PMs and domain leads to define where AI autonomy vs. human involvement is needed
• Evaluate and integrate foundation models (Azure OpenAI, fine-tuned models) for tasks such as risk scoring, remediation planning, and blast radius analysis
• Stay ahead of industry solutions (Wiz AI-APP, CrowdStrike Charlotte AI, Palo Alto XSIAM)
  
  

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Set technical direction across multiple teams (20–30 engineers)
• Drive architecture decisions, design reviews, and engineering excellence
• Mentor senior engineers (L63–L65) and grow the AI-for-security discipline
• Represent the team across Microsoft (Security Copilot, MSG, Azure AI, Research)
  
  

Qualifications

Must Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years applying ML/AI to production systems
• Deep expertise in LLM application development, including prompt engineering, RAG, and agent frameworks such as AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, or similar
• Strong systems design skills, including distributed cloud systems, streaming pipelines, graph databases, and API design at scale
• Experience building security products or working with security data such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity, and cloud posture
• Track record of driving ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives from concept to production
  
  

Preferred

• Proficiency in Python and at least one systems language such as C, Go, Rust, or Java
• Experience with Microsoft Security stack including Defender, Sentinel, Entra, Purview, Intune, and MSEM
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-use patterns for LLM agents
• Background in security operations, red teaming, or exposure management
• Experience with knowledge graphs and graph-based reasoning for security
• Publications or patents in AI/ML applied to cybersecurity
• Experience with Azure OpenAI Service, Copilot extensibility, or Security Copilot skills development
• BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
  
  

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.