The posting
Overview
As a Security Software Engineer on the Copilot Security Team, you will serve as a senior level technical leader responsible for designing, building, and governing security‑critical software systems that protect Microsoft’s agentic and autonomous AI experiences at scale.
You will operate across the full Copilot security lifecycle—threat discovery → architectural design → mitigation engineering → production integration → continuous validation—delivering durable, reusable security defenses rather than one‑off fixes. This role combines deep hands‑on engineering with system‑level security thinking, enabling the team’s mission to deliver secure‑by‑design architecture for Copilot across products and integrations.
Success in this role is measured by measurable risk reduction, improved platform resilience, and the long‑term sustainability of Copilot’s security posture—not by isolated vulnerability closures.
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
- Design, deploy, and operate production-scale ML systems that protect Copilot experiences, ensuring high reliability, performance, and security at global scale, targeting threats such as prompt injections, adversarial inputs, and agentic workflow abuse.
- Develop adaptive detection and policy models that are capable of learning from evolving attacker behavior to offer durable protection against emerging AI security threats.
- Build and own evaluation frameworks for AI security, including adversarial testing, red teaming support, and continuous robustness measurement across real Copilot scenarios.
- Define success metrics and conduct rigorous experimentation to quantify security effectiveness, adversarial robustness, precision/recall tradeoffs, and user experience impact.
- Partner with security and engineering teams to integrate ML defenses into secure orchestration frameworks that govern agent delegation, tool calling, and action execution.
- Monitor and analyze telemetry to improve model performance, reduce false positives/negatives, and guide iterative defense improvements.
- Collaborate cross functionally with product, privacy, and AI platform teams to land agentic security patterns across Microsoft Copilot ecosystem.
- Document and share applied ML security techniques, helping establish best practices for secure agentic AI across Microsoft.
- On-call Engineering Duties.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or PythonOR equivalent experience.
Other 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:
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or PythonOR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Experience designing, building, and operating security critical software systems in production, including responsibility for correctness, availability, performance, and long term maintainability.
- Experience in threat modeling efforts for complex, distributed systems and driving mitigations from design through production deployment.
- Experience identifying, analyzing, and remediating security vulnerabilities in collaboration with security response, red team, or incident response partners.
- Experience building or contributing to security defenses such as enforcement layers, guardrails, detection, monitoring, or evaluation tooling in production environments.
- Experience working with distributed systems, including service to service communication, identity, authorization, telemetry, and failure isolation.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements.
- Experience serving as a technical lead or architectural reviewer for security sensitive systems across multiple services or teams.
- Experience conducting vulnerability research, red teaming, or adversarial testing, including identifying novel or emerging attack classes.
- Experience participating in or leading incident response, post incident analysis, and translating incidents into durable, reusable security improvements.
- Experience designing reusable, platform level security solutions that eliminate classes of vulnerabilities rather than one off fixes.
- Experience establishing or operating risk management frameworks, including maintaining risk registries, defining mitigation priorities, and tracking measurable risk reduction.
- Experience building or operating security metrics, dashboards, or evaluation pipelines that demonstrate real world security impact.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers through design reviews, threat model coaching, or architectural guidance.
- Experience securing AI driven, agentic, or tool invoking systems, including prompt based architectures or orchestration layers.
- Experience communicating security architecture decisions and tradeoffs to engineering leadership, PM/TPM, and executive stakeholders.
- Ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous, fast‑evolving security environments, particularly those involving autonomous or generative AI systems.
#AI Security, #AI Systems, #SecurityEngineering
Software Engineering IC4 - 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. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft 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.
