Principal Software Engineer

Overview

The Cloud & AI 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. Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.

TEAM OVERVIEW: The Insider Risk team is Microsoft's enterprise authority for identifying, assessing, investigating, and mitigating insider risk across the company. We protect Microsoft's people, data, systems, facilities, and operations by building proactive capabilities that help detect and respond to risks involving authorized access, sensitive environments, and critical assets. Our work brings together security engineering, data science, investigations, intelligence, governance, and cross-company partnerships with Legal, HR, Privacy, Security, and other organizations to reduce risk while upholding Microsoft's commitments to trust, privacy, and responsible operations.

ROLE OVERVIEW: We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape and build the technical foundations of Microsoft's Insider Risk platform. In this role, you will lead architecture and engineering efforts across risk modeling, behavioral analytics, detections, monitoring, investigation workflows, case orchestration, and large-scale security data systems. You will partner closely with investigators, data scientists, security teams, and business stakeholders to turn complex risk scenarios into scalable, privacy-conscious engineering solutions. This is an opportunity to drive high-impact security innovation at enterprise scale and help Microsoft proactively protect its most critical assets.

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy for core Insider Risk engineering systems that help Microsoft proactively identify, assess, investigate, and mitigate enterprise insider risk.
• Lead architecture and delivery of scalable, secure, and privacy-conscious platforms that operate across Microsoft's large and complex data estate, including risk signals, detections, behavioral analytics, investigation workflows, and case orchestration.
• Negotiate priorities, dependencies, and technical tradeoffs with partner teams across the enterprise, driving alignment on shared outcomes, delivery plans, and durable platform integrations.
• Partner with Security, Legal, HR, Privacy, investigations, data science, and business stakeholders to translate sensitive and ambiguous risk scenarios into practical, high-impact engineering solutions.
• Uphold the highest standards of discretion, confidentiality, privacy, and compliance in how Insider Risk capabilities are designed, operated, monitored, and communicated.
• Mentor and influence engineers across teams, raising the bar for design quality, code quality, reliability, security, operational excellence, and responsible data use.
• Build deep expertise in enterprise-scale security, insider risk, AI-native engineering, and data-informed decision making while solving problems with significant company impact.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors 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.

Other Requirements:

Candidates must be able 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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This role will require access to information that is controlled for export under export control regulations, potentially under the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations or Export Administration Regulations, the EU Dual Use Regulation, and/or other export control regulations. As a condition of employment, the successful candidate will be required to provide either proof of their country of citizenship or proof of their U.S. permanent residency or other protected status (e.g., under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)) for assessment of eligibility to access the export controlled information. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate's citizenship will be verified with a valid passport. Lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees may verify status using other documents, where applicable.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate's citizenship will be verified with a valid passport

Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• Previous experience in Cybersecurity & Insider Risk is a plus.

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.