Microsoft
Principal Software Engineer
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 16, 2026
- Experience
- 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding; equivalent experience accepted. Preferred alternatives: Master’s degree plus 8+ years, or Bachelor’s degree plus 12+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads the design and implementation of distributed systems and security tooling that detect, evaluate, and mitigate threats across Microsoft’s AI and Copilot systems.
What you'll do
- Architect security-focused distributed systems, telemetry, CI/CD safety gates, and automated validations.
- Set engineering direction for adversarial testing, model evaluation, risk measurement, and secure deployment tooling.
- Partner across security, research, science, platform, and product teams to turn risks into scalable mitigations and communicate technical strategy.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience 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
- Experience building or operating security-critical systems, evaluation frameworks, or platform services.
- Familiarity with adversarial testing, AI/ML evaluation, telemetry pipelines, or secure-by-design engineering.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base salary); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base salary)
Tools
C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python
AI focus
Builds security protections for AI systems, including adversarial testing, model evaluation, risk measurement, monitoring, and secure deployment; promotes effective adoption of agentic workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative