Principal Software Engineer

Overview Security represents one of 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.

Purview Team is building the data security platform for the era of AI. Our team develops globally distributed services that discover and classify sensitive data at scale and enforce protection across Microsoft 365, endpoints, AI experiences, and multicloud data estates.

As autonomous agents increasingly read documents, call tools, create derived content, and act on a user’s behalf, the industry needs new ways to understand where sensitive data originated, how it was transformed, and which protections follow it through every interaction. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and delivery of the next generation of data protection capabilities.

You will own critical product areas end to end, translating customer and business needs into architecture and then driving those solutions through implementation, validation, deployment, and live-site operations.

This is a deeply hands-on engineering role where you will write substantial production code, solve complex distributed-systems challenges, lead the implementation of critical components, and remain closely connected to the code and operational behavior of the systems you own.

You will also drive technical alignment across partner teams, resolve cross-service dependencies, and ensure that solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, and ready for production. The scope requires both effective individual technical contribution and the ability to multiply the impact of others.

You will work through ambiguity, use customer signals, engineering data, and sound technical judgment to identify and prioritize the highest-impact problems, and create clarity that enables multiple teams to execute against a shared direction.

You will raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews, mentoring, engineering excellence, and operational leadership while influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate team.

If you want to build production systems, lead consequential projects from idea through sustained operation, and help define how enterprise data is protected as AI becomes a fundamental part of computing, this is an opportunity to have significant product and customer impact.

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

• Own and drive complex, high-impact projects end to end, from identifying customer and business problems and defining requirements through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, adoption, and live-site operations, taking accountability for measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Be a deeply hands-on technical leader who writes substantial production code, not limited to prototypes or proofs of concept. Lead implementation of critical components, solve the hardest engineering problems, and maintain deep knowledge of the architecture and codebase while enabling other engineers to execute effectively.
• Own the architecture and long-term technical direction for critical areas of the data security platform, translating ambiguous customer, business, security, and compliance requirements into scalable solutions and durable technical roadmaps spanning multiple services and engineering teams.
• Lead cross-team engineering execution and technical alignment, driving designs, interfaces, dependency contracts, implementation plans, prioritization, and production readiness across organizational boundaries while using data, customer signals, and sound engineering judgment to make appropriate technical and investment tradeoffs.
• Drive engineering excellence, reliability, security, privacy, and operational quality at cloud scale, establishing a high bar for code quality, automated testing, telemetry and measurable service health, safe deployment and rollback, threat modeling, security controls, live-site operations, and continuous improvement.
• Multiply the technical effectiveness of the broader engineering organization, setting a high bar through design and code reviews, mentoring and developing engineers, introducing responsible AI-native engineering practices, and creating clarity in ambiguous spaces so multiple teams can execute successfully against a shared technical direction.
• Embody our  Culture  and  Values

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 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:

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

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating scalable, highly available cloud services or distributed systems, including production ownership, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical architecture across multiple engineering teams or organizations, including defining technical contracts, standards, or shared patterns adopted outside the immediate team.
• Experience designing secure, latency-sensitive policy evaluation, authorization, or access-control systems, with applied knowledge of authentication, data protection, access control, and secure coding practices.
• Experience building applications with LLMs and generative AI technologies, including agent orchestration, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, or model evaluation using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, DSPy, Transformers, Haystack, or equivalent.

#MSFTSecurity #SecurityAI #DataSecurity #MicrosoftPurview #PurviewForAI

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing