Senior Service Engineer - CTJ - Top Secret

About the role

Microsoft has an exciting opportunity for an experienced Senior Service Engineer to join the Microsoft Specialized Clouds organization as part of the Secure Cloud Access (SCA) group. The Secure Cloud Access group enables secure access and transfer between enclaves and supports other transfer and access types, enabling a wide set of capabilities within highly regulated industries. We are looking for engineers to join a fast-paced team and solve complex problems in the domain of mission-critical distributed systems spanning data transmission across clouds.

Our team works across all facets of isolated system engineering but is deeply involved in service automation and reliability improvements, software development, network architecting and implementation, and cloud engineering. In this role, you will build, deploy, and support systems that enable a broad set of Azure services to be consumed by customers in highly secured and regulated industries. These systems must meet the security policy and assurance requirements of both public and private sector customers.

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

• Respond to incidents during regular on-call rotations by identifying the level of impact, troubleshooting issues, and deploying appropriate fixes to resolve root cause(s).
• Alert product teams and owners to major customer-impacting issues and escalate resolution of complex and highly impactful issues affecting multiple components or features to other engineers or engineering teams as needed.
• Share details related to incidents and their resolution through postmortem reports and during regular review meetings.
• Demonstrate understanding of service and/or system design, interactions between technology layers and components, functions of physical infrastructure (networking and servers) and cloud-based infrastructure, and dependencies at scale.
• Contribute to improving service architecture and design of a hybrid (physical and cloud-based) service through automation, software development, and networking with minimal guidance.
• Adjust configurations and define infrastructures to improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and/or performance of supported products and services, with minimal guidance from other engineers.
• Design, implement, and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions to provision and manage hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure in a repeatable, secure, and auditable manner, minimizing configuration drift and manual intervention.
• Author, review, and maintain IaC templates and modules to deploy networking, compute, storage, identity, security controls, and PKI-related infrastructure across isolated and regulated environments, following least privilege and defense-in-depth principles.
• Stay current in knowledge and expertise as the technology landscape evolves, specifically in Cloud networking, physical networking, automation, and Linux (Debian and Red Hat-based distributions). Contribute to the adoption of new solutions.
• Proactively seek opportunities to learn and receive feedback. Share insights and best practices to improve the development and operations of the system, platform, or product components and features by participating in design reviews, incident drills and debriefs, and regular meetings, as well as interactions with more experienced Service Engineers and members of product engineering teams.
• Embody Microsoft’s culture and values.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Data Science, Cybersecurity, or related field AND 3+ years of technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, service engineering, systems engineering, or industrial controls OR equivalent experience.
• Active Top Secret (TS) clearance and willingness/eligibility to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph), or active TS/SCI clearance with willingness/eligibility to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph). This role requires maintaining the TS/SCI (with polygraph) clearance.
• U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Citizenship will be verified via a valid passport or other approved documents, or verified U.S. government clearance.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in scripting languages such as Linux Bash, Windows PowerShell, and Python.
• Experience with Linux operating system distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Azure Linux.
• Experience working with common automation technologies such as Ansible.
• Hands-on experience building and operating Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using tools such as ARM/Bicep or equivalent declarative or programmatic provisioning frameworks.
• Experience developing reusable IaC modules and managing versioned infrastructure definitions across multiple environments (e.g., development, test, production, and isolated enclaves).
• Familiarity integrating IaC into CI/CD systems for automated infrastructure deployment, drift detection, and compliance validation.
• Experience managing infrastructure state, secrets, and credentials securely within IaC workflows.
• Understanding of applying IaC to hybrid and isolated environments, including networking, PKI, security appliances, Linux-based systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Ability to review, troubleshoot, and refactor IaC code for scalability, security, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

Pay

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.