Principal Software Engineer - AI Safety and Security

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help protect users through its AI Safety Platform, a shared platform for AI observability, detection, investigation, and threat hunting. The role leads architecture and implementation of large-scale data and detection systems, applies AI security research, and partners with engineering, science, security, and incident response teams to deliver safer AI platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and implementation of shared platform capabilities: guide architecture and technology decisions, establish reusable engineering patterns, write critical production code, and unblock complex technical work across teams
• Build and evolve company-wide AI observability and monitoring systems that enable attack reconstruction, automated detection, evaluation, threat hunting, and investigation, using modern agentic development tools and AI-assisted coding workflows to prototype, evaluate, and iterate rapidly
• Design detection infrastructure for attack signatures, pattern matching, behavioral anomaly detection, model-assisted analysis, and emerging research techniques. Apply emerging AI security research to detection, evaluation, observability, and safer implementation patterns
• Build and operate large-scale distributed data processing systems using technologies such as Spark, Kusto, data lakes, and batch and streaming platforms. Develop high-volume data integrations and correlation pipelines that turn multi-source telemetry into investigation-ready evidence, threat intelligence, trends, and reporting
• Drive technical partner conversations and security and privacy architecture reviews, resolve detailed design constraints, and work with teams through integration and implementation
• Review designs and code, mentor engineers and scientists, and raise the technical bar across teams

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience, including significant ownership of distributed data, platform, or security products with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
• 2+ years of experience working on modern AI systems, such as copilots, agent-based products, LLM applications, agent orchestration and tool use, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, or evaluations
• 2+ years of experience big data engineering, such as Spark, Kusto, data lakes, batch and streaming pipelines, data quality, performance tuning, and cost and reliability trade-offs
• Demonstrated success designing and delivering complex production systems in ambiguous, cross-functional environments, identifying and addressing security and privacy risks in complex production systems
• Proven coding, system design, written communication, and technical leadership skills
• End-to-end technical ownership of complex platforms, data, security, or AI products
• Hands-on experience with alerting, triage, investigation, threat hunting, or incident response
• Experience leading security and privacy architecture reviews, applying threat-modeling and secure-by-design principles, and translating review requirements into implementable designs
• Deep understanding of agentic systems, tools, memory, embeddings, and AI system failure modes
• Experience with cloud-native distributed platforms, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Kubernetes, or equivalent systems
• Demonstrated record of mentoring and influencing engineers, researchers, product leaders, and partner organizations without direct authority