Principal Security Software Engineer

Microsoft Azure is at the center of Microsoft’s cloud services strategy and the future of Microsoft. Azure brings together virtualization, compute, storage, authentication, authorization, artificial intelligence and machine learning, media and more to enable anyone to bring their business in the cloud. Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. 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 Azure Customer Experiences (CXP) organization is on a mission to convert Azure customers into Azure fans. We want to ensure that our first- and third-party offerings adhere to the security standards, and that our products uphold the promise we have to our customers and partners. 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. 

We are seeking a diligent, insightful, and creative Principal Security Software Engineer to discover, diagnose, analyze, quantify, characterize and help drive solutions for the most challenging security problems in CXP through a data-driven, product-driven lens.

In this role, you will advance security by working with other Security Engineers, Program and Product Managers, and Developers, as well as business leaders throughout Microsoft to turn individual findings and vulnerabilities into patterns and insights that can be measured and managed through engineering, automation, and other appropriate mitigations.  You will identify the most demanding security problems through original research and data analysis and help design and deliver practical solutions at scale for select products and services. You will work up and down the stack, across platforms, operating systems, languages, and frameworks, using your broad security skills to solve problems in unfamiliar domains. You will demonstrate deep threat modelling expertise including experience in identifying attack vectors and creating comprehensive threat models. You have an understanding of security design patterns (defense in depth, least privilege, zero trust) and when to apply them. You reason through various tradeoffs between security, performance, and usability. You have a deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud architectures, networking, and AuthN/AuthZ systems to allow you to spot vulnerabilities across the stack. You explain security risks to non-technical stakeholders, mentor and coach other Engineers on secure coding patterns and drive a security culture.

 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. 

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

• Demonstrates technical leadership and participate in the broader Microsoft and industry-wide security community to advance the state of the art.   
• Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across the company that adheres to design specifications. 
• Works with product teams within CXP in collaboration with security team to examine chosen target systems in detail, looking for vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and, in collaboration with other penetration testing and red teams around the company, demonstrates the value of an “assume breach” mentality.  
• Stays on the forefront of emerging threats which affect cloud services through collaboration and original research, including proactive security research on the technologies that Azure and our customers utilize and depend on.  
• Provides technical leadership on adding new tests to cover gaps, deleting or fixing broken tests, and improving the speed, reliability, and defect localization of the overall test suite across a solution or product. 
• Leads efforts and mentors others to build software developer tools to support easier, faster, and more effective software engineering across products.   

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience working in security and services at an enterprise level.
• OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience working security principles and architectures, including, but not limited to, the principles of least privilege, least common mechanism, economy of mechanism, and others.
• 6+ years of experience working with technologies and mechanisms to achieve compute isolation, network isolation, authentication and authorization, and auditing and alerting.  

Other Requirements:

The ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements is 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:

• Effective communication skills, including proposing and reporting to executive leadership
• Proven ability to influence cross-org stakeholders without direct authority 
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, or equivalent 
• Deep understanding of network protocols, firewalls, VPNs, and intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS). 

Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 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 October 22, 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.