Senior AI Engineer, Security AI

Overview

The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft's mission to secure digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in customers' heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of Microsoft's internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day.

Cloud Security is a team within Microsoft Cloud + AI and the Office of the CISO focused on protecting Microsoft's cloud environment at scale. We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer, Security AI to help build AI-powered security systems for Cloud Security.

In this individual contributor role, you will design, develop, evaluate, and improve AI capabilities built on large language models, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, feedback-driven optimization, multi-modal security signals, and rigorous evaluation frameworks. You will work at the intersection of agentic systems, applied AI, cloud security, and responsible AI to create platform capabilities that improve detection, investigation, response, and proactive risk reduction across Microsoft's cloud environment.

The ideal candidate has experience building and operating frontier AI systems, improving model and agent behavior through experimentation and evaluation, developing novel approaches for reasoning and decision support, and applying state-of-the-art advances in AI to real-world security problems. You will collaborate with engineering, applied science, threat intelligence, security operations, product, and partner teams across Cloud + AI to deliver systems that are secure by design, operationally excellent, durable and grounded in measurable platform impact.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and advance AI approaches using large language models, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, feedback-driven optimization, multi-modal security signals, and rigorous evaluation frameworks to support security engineering and security operations workflows.
• Translate open-ended security challenges into AI problems, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and develop measurable success criteria.
• Develop innovative approaches for reasoning over complex security information, synthesizing context, identifying patterns, and generating actionable insights.
• Design and improve agent architectures, planning and execution strategies, tool-use frameworks, memory systems, retrieval techniques, and grounding mechanisms for security applications.
• Define evaluation methodologies, benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and testing frameworks to measure quality, accuracy, safety, robustness, trustworthiness, and real-world impact.
• Analyze model behavior and failure modes, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop techniques to improve accuracy, actionability, and reliability.
• Partner with engineering teams to operationalize AI innovations and integrate research advances into production systems.
• Drive responsible AI practices, including fairness, transparency, safety, robustness, security, governance, and human oversight.

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 Python, OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to:

• 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 or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Experience designing experiments, evaluating performance of AI models and systems, defining metrics, and applying scientific methods to improve AI system quality.
• Experience with large language models, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, feedback-driven optimization, multi-modal security signals, and rigorous evaluation frameworks.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to translate complex real-world challenges into tractable AI problems.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain AI concepts, methodologies, limitations, results, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience developing AI agents, copilots, autonomous workflows, tool-using systems, planning systems, or multi-agent architectures.
• Experience with LLM evaluation, AI safety, adversarial testing, hallucination mitigation, prompt engineering, prompt injection defense, and responsible AI practices.
• Experience with embedding models, vector search, retrieval systems, ranking algorithms, knowledge graphs, memory architectures, and context-grounding techniques.
• Experience building evaluation datasets, benchmark suites, red-team methodologies, human evaluation frameworks, or trustworthiness assessment systems.
• Experience applying AI to cybersecurity, including threat detection, vulnerability analysis, security operations, incident response, identity systems, or risk assessment.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical innovation, publish or operationalize novel approaches, influence technical strategy, and drive impactful AI advancements in ambiguous problem domains.

Compensation

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.

Equal Opportunity

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.