Principal Security Engineer

We are seeking a Principal Security Engineer to join our Autonomous Defense and Protection Team (ADAPT). 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.

In this role, you will lead the design, deployment, and management of infrastructure to support cutting-edge security research and autonomous simulation environments. Your focus will include building scalable, secure, and reproducible research environments through infrastructure as code, enabling the testing and simulation of adversarial techniques to generate incident data and produce ground truth for defensive and offensive operations. You will collaborate closely with security researchers, applied scientists, and red team operators to enable advanced experimentation, streamline operational workflows, and enhance the efficiency of our simulation and testing frameworks.

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.

Required/Minimum 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.
• 6+ years experience with hands-on deploying attacker infrastructure for red team operations and designing adversary simulation ranges to support research, testing, and development of adversary techniques.
• Hands-on experience with Azure, AWS, and GCP environments.

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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.  

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• OR Master's 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 equivalent experience.
• Verbal and written communication skills with the ability to convey complex security concepts effectively.
• Previous project management skills with a proven track record of driving projects to completion.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 12, 2025.

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