Principal Security Engineering Manager

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.

Microsoft Red team is launching the AI Adversary Lab (AIAL) in ILDC, a new extension of the U.S.–based Microsoft Red Team, to address the growing threat of AI-enabled adversaries through deep engineering and applied research. The team will comprise approximately 10 people, split between engineering and research, with an extreme focus on AI Security. This is a manager position focused on building this team that will establish you as a leader in AI Security at Microsoft.
Your team will have two groups: an engineering group and a research group reporting up to the Microsoft Red Team. The engineering group will collaborate with U.S.-based Red Team engineers to enhance and scale an AI-driven adversary emulation platform that we use to protect Microsoft. The research group will analyze Microsoft's AI infrastructure, especially Azure AI services, to identify risks and improve resilience. Both groups will work together under your leadership, building solutions and identifying vulnerabilities for further research.
We are looking for a Software Engineering and Research Manager to lead AIAL under the Microsoft Red team. In this role, you will grow and lead a high-performing team of engineers who are building and evolving the next generation of AI-based red teaming tools. You’ll work closely with Red Team operators, global defenders, and peer teams in the U.S. including MSTIC and GHOST.

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

• Lead and support a team of software engineers building AI-enhanced adversary emulation tools
• Partner with U.S.–based Red Team engineering counterparts to improve and scale our existing AI platform
• Collaborate with the local research team to integrate infrastructure vulnerabilities into automated test campaigns
• Align closely with Red Team operators, MSTIC, and GHOST to capture attacker TTPs and turn them into automated, scalable simulations
• Maintain a strong engineering culture focused on security, reliability, and innovation
• Mentor, develop, and grow your team with a focus on clarity, purpose, and career growth
• Drive meaningful impact in Microsoft’s security posture through continuous adversary simulation

Qualifications

• You have at least 15+ years of professional software development experience
•You have experience with managing technical engineering teams
• Ability to hire and mentor highly technical engineers
• Experience building distributed systems or AI-enabled services in production
• Familiarity with attacker tradecraft and adversary emulation methodologies

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with Red Team operations or offensive security tooling
• Knowledge of large language models, agent-based systems, or AI-native security applications
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (e.g., Python, C#) and cloud-native architectures (especially Azure)
• Proven ability to lead technical efforts in high-impact, fast-evolving environments

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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.

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