{"id":1831589,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security","title":"Principal Software Engineer - AI Safety and Security","company":{"id":18,"name":"Microsoft","domain":"microsoft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/microsoft","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":116,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Redmond, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":142800,"max":274800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":274800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Anomaly Detection","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"Azure Data Factory","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Databricks","optional":true},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-11T21:01:59Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T21:22:09Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":34,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":34},"description":"OverviewAI systems are rapidly becoming more capable, autonomous, interconnected, and embedded in products people depend on. As models gain memory, tools, identity, and the ability to act across systems, new risks can emerge through long-running interactions, coordinated agents, and behavior spanning accounts, products, and time-often beyond what any individual product or runtime control can see. Within the Artificial Generative Intelligence Security (AeGIS) team, the AI Safety Platform (AISP) is Microsoft's shared AI observability, detection, investigation, and hunting platform built for this new landscape. We connect fragmented activity across Microsoft's AI estate and turn it into reusable detections, investigation-ready evidence, threat intelligence, and customer protection.\nWe are looking for a hands-on Principal Software Engineer for a deeply consequential technical builder role at the intersection of cybersecurity and generative AI. You will lead through code and ideas: defining detailed architectures, building large-scale data and detection systems, working through security and privacy reviews, and partnering with cross-company leaders, product engineers, applied scientists, threat hunters, and incident responders from early exploration through production operation. The ideal candidate is deeply curious about how AI systems work, how they break, and how to make them safer and more robust.\nWe are a mission-driven, collaborative team that leans into uncertainty, learns quickly, and builds on one another's ideas. Our people bring a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines, and life experiences, and we believe that diversity makes both our engineering and our judgment stronger. We want someone energized by technically fascinating problems and by the responsibility to protect users at the scale of some of the world's most widely deployed AI platforms.\nMicrosoft’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.\nResponsibilities\nLead the design and implementation of shared platform capabilities: guide architecture and technology decisions, establish reusable engineering patterns, write critical production code, and unblock complex technical work across teams. \nBuild and evolve company-wide AI observability and monitoring systems that enable attack reconstruction, automated detection, evaluation, threat hunting, and investigation, using modern agentic development tools and AI-assisted coding workflows to prototype, evaluate, and iterate rapidly. \nDesign detection infrastructure for attack signatures, pattern matching, behavioral anomaly detection, model-assisted analysis, and emerging research techniques. Apply emerging AI security research to detection, evaluation, observability, and safer implementation patterns. \nBuild and operate large-scale distributed data processing systems using technologies such as Spark, Kusto, data lakes, and batch and streaming platforms. Develop high-volume data integrations and correlation pipelines that turn multi-source telemetry into investigation-ready evidence, threat intelligence, trends, and reporting. \nDrive technical partner conversations and security and privacy architecture reviews, resolve detailed design constraints, and work with teams through integration and implementation. \nReview designs and code, mentor engineers and scientists, and raise the technical bar across teams. \nQualifications\nRequired Qualifications:\nBachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience, including significant ownership of distributed data, platform, or security products with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or PythonOR equivalent experience. \n\nOther 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:\nMicrosoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.\nPreferred Qualifications:\n2+ years of experience working on modern AI systems, such as copilots, agent-based products, LLM applications, agent orchestration and tool use, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, or evaluations. \n2+ years of experience big data engineering, such as Spark, Kusto, data lakes, batch and streaming pipelines, data quality, performance tuning, and cost and reliability trade-offs. \nDemonstrated success designing and delivering complex production systems in ambiguous, cross-functional environments, identifying and addressing security and privacy risks in complex production systems. \nProven coding, system design, written communication, and technical leadership skills. \nEnd-to-end technical ownership of complex platforms, data, security, or AI products. \nHands-on experience with alerting, triage, investigation, threat hunting, or incident response. \nExperience leading security and privacy architecture reviews, applying threat-modeling and secure-by-design principles, and translating review requirements into implementable designs. \nDeep understanding of agentic systems, tools, memory, embeddings, and AI system failure modes. \nExperience with cloud-native distributed platforms, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Kubernetes, or equivalent systems. \nDemonstrated record of mentoring and influencing engineers, researchers, product leaders, and partner organizations without direct authority. \nSoftware 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.\nCertain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:\nhttps://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay\nThis position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.\nMicrosoft 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7390,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Console Games","Gaming Consoles","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-04T12:19:11Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.455,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":33,"expected_fill_days":19,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":274800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T00:41:53Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1308,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/microsoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-software-engineer-ai-safety-and-security"}]}