Principal Security Engineer

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’ 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 to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. 

The Microsoft Security AI team is responsible for defending Microsoft and our customers through applied AI innovation. 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. Defending Microsoft’s complex environment provides a unique opportunity to build and evaluate autonomous defense and offense through emerging generative AI capabilities. Microsoft understands and learns from its own defensive and offensive expertise, including via teams like Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Microsoft’s Red Team, and can build a knowledgeable graph describing the relationship between risk, investigation, and response. This data, built over Microsoft’s complex digital estate, along with Microsoft AI forms the foundation for innovative solutions to defend Microsoft. 

We are looking for a Principal Security Engineer to architect and automate large-scale cloud environments that fuel cutting-edge security research and autonomous simulation. Leveraging infrastructure-as-code across Azure, AWS, and GCP, you will create reproducible enterprise-grade ranges where AI-driven adversary emulations and detection experiments can run safely at scale. Your work will generate high-fidelity telemetry, accelerate threat analytics, and establish the guardrails that empower researchers, applied scientists, and red-team operators across the organization. Operating as a hands-on technical leader, you will define best practices, mentor, and ensure our lab infrastructure remains secure, cost-efficient, and ready for the next breakthrough. 

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.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Security Engineer, you will: 

• Architect, automate, and harden multi-cloud research environments via infrastructure-as-code, baking in security controls, policy-as-code guardrails, and one-click teardown to enable rapid, cost-efficient iteration. 

• Engineer telemetry pipelines that let AI-driven adversary simulations run safely at scale, capturing identity, network, and endpoint signals as labeled ground-truth datasets for detection and model training. 

• Collaborate closely with security researchers, red-teamers, and applied scientists to translate attack hypotheses into reusable IaC modules and cloud-native patterns that replicate real-world campaigns. 

• Iterate on simulation frameworks—reducing environment spin-up time, broadening scenario coverage across new cloud services, and embedding detection hooks for blue-team validation. 

• Instrument environments with end-to-end observability dashboards that surface reliability, performance, and spend, driving continuous optimization of lab operations. 

• Evangelize best practices through internal workshops, open-source contributions, and conference presentations, mentoring engineers and advancing the state of secure cloud research infrastructure. 

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field. 

• OR 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. 

• 5+ years designing and operating production cloud infrastructure, of which 3+ years were dedicated to hands-on security research (e.g., adversary simulation, log analysis, etc) that drove new detections or mitigations. 

• Proficient coding ability in at least one modern language (Python, Go, or comparable) and deep proficiency in infrastructure-as-code frameworks (e.g., Terraform, ARM/Bicep, or CloudFormation). 

• Demonstrated expertise wiring comprehensive cloud-telemetry pipelines and policy-as-code guardrails—ensuring complete log coverage, automated teardown, for large research 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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field. 

• OR 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. 

• Proven record of shipping open-source security tooling or presenting original research at conferences such as Black Hat, DEFCON, BSIDES or others. 

• Experience applying large-language models or multi-agent frameworks to security automation, adversary simulation, or detection engineering. 

• Previous project management skills with a proven track record of driving projects to completion. 

Security Research IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until June 29, 2025.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work. 

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