Sr. Security Operations Engineer (AI)

Location: Mountain View, New York, or Redmond, United States

Salary: USD $119,800–$234,700 per year across the U.S.; USD $160,200–$261,000 per year in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area

Company

Microsoft AI develops and operates first-party AI models and the infrastructure used across Foundry, Copilot, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft products.

What you will do

• Own complex security engineering problems from discovery and design through implementation, deployment, validation, and iteration.
• Build production-quality security tools, controls, detections, automations, integrations, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Improve security across application and product systems, cloud and platform infrastructure, identity and secrets, developer systems, software supply chain, data, and AI infrastructure.
• Use architecture analysis, threat modeling, code and configuration review, telemetry, adversarial testing, incident evidence, and data analysis to identify and reduce risks.
• Support incidents and exercises, investigate root causes, improve containment and recovery, and turn lessons into systemic improvements.
• Work with product, research, platform, infrastructure, developer-experience, identity, data, and operations teams to implement and validate changes.

Requirements

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or a related field; or a master's degree with 3+ years of relevant experience; or a bachelor's degree with 4+ years of relevant experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience in software development, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cybersecurity, anomaly detection, SOC detection, SIEM, IT, or operations incident response.
• Strong software, infrastructure, or security-engineering experience, including writing, debugging, testing, and operating production code or automation.
• Experience independently taking complex technical problems from unclear requirements through implementation and sustained production use.
• Experience with security judgment, detection engineering, incident investigation, threat hunting, adversary simulation, vulnerability research, product security, or infrastructure hardening.
• Clear written communication and the ability to explain technical work to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Doctorate with 3+ years, master's degree with 6+ years, or bachelor's degree with 8+ years of relevant experience.
• CISSP, CISA, CISM, SANS, OSCP, or Security+ certification.
• Experience securing cloud, distributed, identity, data, developer-platform, AI, machine-learning, or large-scale compute systems.
• Experience using large language models or agents in software engineering, security analysis, investigation, or operational automation with appropriate validation and oversight.

Culture & Benefits

• Work closely with frontier-model development, including training, evaluation, deployment, and operation.
• Help establish the engineering practices, tools, standards, operating mechanisms, and culture of a growing Microsoft AI security organization.
• Use AI routinely for research, coding, analysis, testing, investigation, and automation while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Build useful improvements rather than only producing findings, with explicit reasoning about risks and tradeoffs.