Principal Software 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’ 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.

Are you a software engineer interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and excited about technologies like OpenAI? Do you want to develop software that empowers security professionals, engineers, and researchers to proactively identify risks in generative AI systems? We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help lead Microsoft's PyRIT Team (https://github.com/Azure/PyRIT), where you'll create software to identify risks in Microsoft's high-stakes AI systems. Our team is made up of engineers from diverse backgrounds who share a passion for innovation and are deeply committed to solving our customers’ most critical challenges. We value thoughtful engineering, building strong relationships with peers and partners, and maintaining a clear focus on impactful outcomes.

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

• Lead efforts to design, implement, and support AI-driven adversary emulation tooling.
• Support partner development teams and the open-source community in contributing to our services.
• Partner with internal defensive security teams to enhance their detection, investigation, and response capabilities.
• Build strong relationships with peers through design reviews, code reviews, and peer mentoring.
• Analyze emerging attack techniques from red teams, adversarial researchers, and external threat actors, applying these insights to develop and refine advanced security tooling.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python or any object oriented programming language
  • OR equivalent experience.

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: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experiene in writing clean, efficient, and maintainable Python code. Experience in debugging, testing, and optimizing Python applications is preferred.
• Ability to develop clear, specific, and contextually relevant prompts for language model libraries. Skills in utilizing LLM library features for fine-tuning and optimizing model outputs. Skilled in evaluating and refining prompts based on model responses to enhance accuracy and relevance.
• Experience in identifying security vulnerabilities, software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cyber security, and anomaly detection.

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: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 17, 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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