Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer - AI Safety and Security
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA +1 · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 1, 2026
- Location
- Redmond, WA
United States - Experience
- 6+ years technical engineering experience; equivalent experience is accepted. Preferred: 2+ years on modern AI systems and 2+ years in big data engineering.
- Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads the design, implementation, and operation of Microsoft’s shared AI observability and security platform, turning telemetry into detections, investigation evidence, and customer protection.
What you'll do
- Architect and build shared platform capabilities, including critical production code and reusable engineering patterns.
- Develop AI observability, detection, evaluation, and large-scale data correlation systems for threat hunting and investigation.
- Lead technical partner discussions and security and privacy reviews; review work and mentor engineers and scientists.
What they ask for
- 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 a listed language OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice to have
- 2+ years working on modern AI systems and 2+ years in big data engineering.
- Experience with security investigations or incident response, security and privacy architecture reviews, cloud-native distributed platforms, or technical leadership.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
Spark, Kusto, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python
AI focus
Builds AI observability, monitoring, detection, evaluation, and threat-hunting capabilities; applies AI security research and model-assisted analysis to improve detection and safer implementation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative