Principal AI Engineer

Role

Microsoft Security NEXT is hiring a Principal AI Engineer to set multi-year strategy and roadmap for AI-native security experiences and the underlying platform. The role leads zero-to-one incubation through MVP and private preview, then drives one-to-many platformization and scale across Microsoft Security products (Defender, Sentinel, Entra, Intune, Purview). This is a hands-on leadership role that combines prototyping, system design, and cross-team orchestration.

Key Responsibilities

• Define technical vision, strategy, and roadmap for AI-native incubation initiatives and align stakeholders across Microsoft Security products and platform teams.
• Lead R&D from zero-to-one (0→1) to MVP and private preview, then drive platformization and scale to GA (1→N).
• Provide hands-on technical leadership: prototype in code, review designs and PRs, define APIs and data contracts, and build well-architected systems.
• Architect model and data layers: choose when to use LLMs vs classical ML, design retrieval/RAG, grounding, model routing/fallbacks, and safety guardrails.
• Establish evaluation frameworks, metrics, and datasets to de-risk systems and improve model quality before broad rollout.
• Ensure Responsible AI, privacy, security, compliance, and incident readiness are integrated from day one.
• Lead and mentor v-teams, cultivate a builder culture of velocity and quality, and engage with enterprise customers and field to drive adoption.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft and government security screening requirements (Microsoft Cloud background check).

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree or extensive experience (examples given: Master’s +8 years or Bachelor’s +12 years) with hands-on coding (Python, C#, C++, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript) and prototyping experience.
• 3+ years working with ML/AI systems (LLMs/GenAI, retrieval/RAG, model serving, experimentation platforms, data pipelines) and establishing evaluation metrics.
• Experience driving complex cross-functional initiatives, program leadership, stakeholder management, and shipping cloud services or platforms at scale (multi-tenant, high-throughput).
• Security domain expertise (threat detection/response, SIEM/SOAR, identity, endpoint, cloud security) and familiarity with analyst workflows.
• Experience with GenAI/LLM techniques and tooling (prompt engineering, retrieval/vector stores, agents/tool use, content safety/guardrails, eval frameworks) and explicit mention of vibe coding experience.

Other

• Demonstrated ability to translate customer workflows into specs, land adoption, and iterate using telemetry and feedback.
• Strong communication skills for aligning diverse stakeholders and presenting technical demos to executives.