Senior Software Engineer, Security AI

Overview 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. Cloud Security is a team within Microsoft Cloud + AI and the Office of the CISO focused on protecting Microsoft’s cloud environment at scale. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Security AI to help build AI-powered security systems for Cloud Security. In this hands-on engineering role, you will design, build, and operate production AI services that combine large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agent-based workflows, knowledge systems, and security data to solve real-world security challenges. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, applied AI, cloud security, and responsible AI to create platform capabilities that improve detection, investigation, response, and proactive risk reduction across Microsoft’s cloud environment. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building production AI systems, translating emerging AI capabilities into practical solutions, and working through complex technical problems at cloud scale. You should be comfortable owning significant technical components, driving implementation from design through operation, and continuously improving systems using data and operational feedback. You will collaborate with engineering, applied science, threat intelligence, security operations, product, and partner teams across Cloud + AI to deliver systems that are secure by design, operationally excellent, durable and grounded in measurable platform 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. 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 Design, build, test, and operate AI-powered services that support security engineering and security operations workflows. Develop AI-enabled workflows that help engineering and security teams analyze information, retrieve relevant context, summarize findings, and make faster, higher-quality decisions. Build scalable systems that use large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, semantic search, knowledge graphs, and related AI techniques to support security scenarios. Implement evaluation, monitoring, and telemetry capabilities to measure AI system quality, reliability, performance, and safety. Partner with engineering, applied science, product, security operations, and other teams to translate AI advances into practical, secure, durable and reliable platform capabilities. Contribute to service architecture, APIs, testing, observability, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. Participate in technical design reviews, architecture discussions, code reviews, and incident investigations. Use data, telemetry, partner feedback, and operational learnings to continuously improve AI capabilities, system reliability, and platform impact. Qualifications Required Qualifications: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ 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: Candidates must be able 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 or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related technical field, OR equivalent industry experience. Experience building multi-agent systems, tool-use frameworks, orchestration layers, autonomous workflows, or AI copilots in production environments. Experience with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, knowledge graphs, entity resolution, ranking, summarization, or context-grounding systems. Experience with LLM evaluation, responsible AI, model safety, hallucination mitigation, prompt injection defense, model monitoring, or AI governance controls. Experience with cloud security, security operations, threat detection, incident response, vulnerability management, identity and access systems, or security data platforms. Experience with Azure services, Azure AI, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, Kusto, Kubernetes, or large-scale telemetry and analytics systems. Demonstrated ability to drive technical solutions from design through production, influence engineering decisions within a team or project area, mentor peers, and deliver measurable customer or business impact. Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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 This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.