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Principal Software Engineer, Perception Platform and AI Systems

Microsoft· Software Engineering
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Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Lead technical architect and principal engineer for the Perception Platform within Microsoft Security, driving architecture, strategy, and foundational AI and platform investments across Generative AI, RAG, memory, agentic and multi-agent systems, identity and authorization, AI safety, and secure distributed cloud platforms in security-sensitive enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

  • Define the architecture and long-term technical strategy for enterprise AI platform capabilities spanning generative AI, retrieval, memory, reasoning, agent orchestration, model interaction, execution, evaluation, extensibility, security, and safety.
  • Architect production-grade AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including data ingestion, indexing, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, context construction, grounding, provenance, re-ranking, and retrieval evaluation.
  • Design enterprise AI memory and knowledge architectures that manage conversational context, durable memory, organizational knowledge, and retrieved information while addressing authorization, provenance, freshness, retention, correction, deletion, and compliance requirements.
  • Architect agentic and multi-agent AI systems that support planning, reasoning, tool use, task decomposition, delegation, collaboration, state and memory management, human-in-the-loop patterns, failure recovery, and bounded autonomous execution.
  • Define identity, authentication, and authorization architectures for AI agents, including user, workload, service, and agent identities; RBAC; delegated authorization; least-privilege access; multi-tenant isolation; secure propagation of identity and authorization context across distributed workflows.
  • Establish security, safety, and execution guardrails that protect AI systems against prompt injection, malicious or untrusted content, unsafe tool invocation, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, unauthorized delegation, excessive agency, and cross-tenant access.
  • Design AI architectures that enforce authorization and trust throughout retrieval and execution, ensuring agents access only permitted data and that AI-generated plans, decisions, and tool calls are independently validated against applicable policies.
  • Establish end-to-end reliability, evaluation, and observability frameworks for distributed AI systems, covering retrieval and model quality, grounding, agent behavior, authorization decisions, tool execution, task completion, safety, telemetry, regression detection, failure recovery, and graceful degradation.
  • Partner across engineering, research, product, security, privacy, and compliance to translate evolving AI capabilities and risks into scalable architectures, balancing quality with reliability, latency, cost, security, safety, and operational complexity.
  • Provide Principal-level technical leadership across Microsoft Security AI platform investments, driving architectural convergence, reusable APIs and frameworks, reference architectures, technical design reviews, foundational investments, and mentoring of senior engineers and technical leaders.

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, Go, JavaScript, or Python - OR equivalent experience

Skills

Required:Distributed systemsGenerative AI / AI systems architectureAgentic / multi-agent systemsIdentity, authentication & authorizationSecurity, safety & compliance in AILeadership & cross-functional collaboration
Nice to have:RBAC and access control
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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