Principal Security Engineer, Operations (AI)

Location: Mountain View, California; New York City, New York; or Redmond, Washington, United States

Base pay: USD $142,800–$274,800 per year across the U.S.; USD $188,000–$304,200 per year in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area.

Company

Microsoft AI develops and operates first-party models used across products including Foundry, Copilot, Microsoft 365, and MDASH.

What you will do

• Define and build security observability across identities, endpoints, workloads, cloud infrastructure, developer systems, model infrastructure, data systems, and business applications.
• Deploy collection agents and design resilient telemetry pipelines with schemas, enrichment, routing, access controls, quality checks, lineage, and cost controls.
• Build SIEM, threat detection, hunting, SOAR, case-management, containment, recovery, and incident-response capabilities.
• Create AI-native security operations using evidence-grounded evaluators, investigation agents, deterministic guardrails, scoped permissions, and human escalation.
• Establish evaluation sets, adversarial tests, replay environments, and quality measures for automated security decisions.
• Lead technical strategy, production implementation, architecture reviews, incident decisions, cross-team adoption, and mentoring.

Requirements

• United States role locations: Mountain View, New York City, or Redmond.
• Doctorate with 3+ years, master's degree with 4+ years, bachelor's degree with 6+ years, or equivalent experience in computer science, mathematics, statistics, cybersecurity, security operations, threat analytics, SIEM, software development, or related fields.
• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating security monitoring, detection, or response systems in complex production environments.
• Strong software-engineering experience with production code, distributed systems, testing, deployment, debugging, and operations.
• Experience leading significant incidents or building capabilities for investigation, containment, and recovery.
• Experience with AI or machine-learning systems for operational or security use cases, including evaluation, human oversight, scoped permissions, and production safety mechanisms.

Nice to have

• CISSP, CISA, CISM, SANS, OSCP, or Security+ certification.
• Experience with Azure security telemetry, Microsoft Sentinel, Defender platforms, Kusto Query Language, AzSecPack, or comparable technologies.
• Experience securing AI or machine-learning infrastructure, large-scale compute, model-development systems, or sensitive research environments.
• Experience with adversary simulation, purple teaming, threat-informed defense, or detection coverage mapping.

Culture & Benefits

• Principal individual-contributor role with influence across security, research, platform, infrastructure, developer-experience, product, safety, privacy, and central security teams.
• Accountability for production systems, detection coverage, incident outcomes, and residual risk.
• Opportunity to establish a new security-operations function and its architecture, standards, operating model, and roadmap.
• Some roles may be eligible for benefits and additional compensation.

Hiring process

• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled, with the posting open for at least five days.