Principal Software Engineer

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft's mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers' heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

As a Principal Software Engineer in the Core Authentication team within Microsoft Entra ID, you will lead the design and evolution of services that form the backbone of Microsoft's identity platform-powering authentication for millions of organizations and issuing hundreds of billions of tokens daily. You will drive architectural decisions and set technical direction for highly distributed, globally scaled systems that meet stringent availability targets of five nines and beyond.

In this role, you will:

• Champion an AI-first engineering culture, leading from the front to embed AI-driven practices for efficiency, automation, and intelligent decision-making across the team.
• Shape the future of authentication by defining patterns and frameworks that enable secure, resilient, and performant identity services.
• Build a secure platform for AI agent authentication, ensuring trust and compliance as AI agents become integral to enterprise workflows.
• Influence cross-organizational initiatives such as Secure Future Initiative, aligning authentication capabilities with Microsoft's strategic security priorities.
• Lead innovation in areas like conditional access, continuous access evaluation, token binding, and credential-free authentication for workload identities-capabilities critical to modern zero-trust architectures.
• Drive operational excellence by championing best practices for reliability, redundancy, and scalability in cloud services.

Our team values diversity, inclusion, and a growth mindset. We believe these principles are foundational to innovation and success. As a Principal Engineer, you will have the opportunity to influence at scale, deliver impactful solutions, and help shape the next generation of identity security for billions of users worldwide. Join us to innovate, inspire, and lead the transformation of identity security and AI integration at Microsoft.

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.

• Lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed identity services with a focus on scalability, security, and performance.
• Drive cross-team system architecture by defining clear contracts across components, conducting deep design reviews, and leveraging telemetry and AI-driven insights to guide strategic decisions.
• Champion engineering excellence by establishing standards for modularity, security, diagnosability, and reusability
• Lead AI-first initiatives by embedding AI-driven automation and efficiency into engineering workflows and fostering a culture that embraces AI for innovation and operational excellence. Own quality and reliability at scale by defining robust integration and end-to-end testing strategies, improving coverage, and proactively addressing systemic risks.
• Ensure operational readiness and live-site health by driving observability, reliability, and maintainability; lead root cause analysis for complex incidents and implement long-term architectural fixes.
• Influence organizational strategy by aligning authentication capabilities with Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative and other company-wide priorities.
• Mentor and grow technical leaders, fostering innovation, accountability, and a growth mindset across the engineering organization.

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor'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 Python OR equivalent experience.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.