Principal Security Engineer

About the role

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, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. The IAMProtect team protects Microsoft’s most critical cloud services by reducing systemic security risk in the layers that matter most—identity, tenant governance, and core infrastructure trust boundaries. The Trusted Computing Base (TCB) represents the highest-impact set of services and trust seams where small gaps can create disproportionate blast radius.

This Principal Security Engineer role is for a hands-on systems architect who can turn ambiguous risk into enforceable controls, drive adoption across engineering organizations, and make security provable in production through clear validation and telemetry.

Responsibilities

• Identify high-leverage security risks and trust seams affecting critical services, and translate them into clear, prioritized mitigation plans.
• Design enforceable security architectures and isolation patterns across identity, tenant/security boundaries, and adjacent infrastructure layers.
• Define security policies and guardrails that can be deployed safely at scale (phased rollout, validation gates, rollback strategy).
• Partner with engineering teams across organizations to land durable controls in production, reducing reliance on exceptions and manual processes.
• Establish proof mechanisms (telemetry/validation) to measure coverage, detect drift, and verify controls are continuously effective.
• Produce crisp technical artifacts (reference architectures, decision docs, implementation guidance) that unblock execution and scale adoption.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response
• OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ years experience in the same fields
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 6+ years experience in the same fields
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements for this role, including passing the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 8+ years in security architecture and/or systems engineering for large-scale cloud or distributed systems.
• Strong technical depth in identity and access management (authN/authZ, RBAC/ABAC concepts, least privilege, credential/secrets lifecycle).
• Demonstrated experience designing security controls that are enforceable (not just reviews/standards) and driving them into production with partner teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to influence senior technical stakeholders and drive decisions.
• Depth in one or more infrastructure verticals (e.g., networking, compute, storage, engineering systems, supply chain/security of build and release).
• Experience building or operating policy/guardrail platforms (stable contracts/APIs, orchestration, deployment validation, drift detection).
• Experience in incident-driven security improvements (translating real attack patterns into durable controls).
• Familiarity with compliance-constrained or regulated cloud environments (e.g., sovereign/regional deployments) and how to maintain security posture under constraints.

Pay

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.