Principal Security Operations Engineering Manager

Overview

Team Purpose

The Microsoft AI Infrastructure Information Security team protects the products, platforms, data, and technology ecosystem that support AI development and operations at scale. You will help the Product and Platform Security team secure services across on-premises and cloud environments by embedding security into how software is designed, built, tested, deployed, and operated. Working across engineering, product, infrastructure, security, and business teams, you will help create secure-by-default development practices that reduce systemic risk while enabling teams to deliver quickly.

Role Summary

As a Principal Security Engineering Manager in the Microsoft AI Infrastructure Information Security team, you will build and lead a team of security engineers responsible for product and platform security. You will own and evolve the secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC), guide architecture and code reviews, expand threat modeling and security testing, and integrate automated guardrails into continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. You will partner with engineering leaders to prioritize risk, establish practical paved paths, and apply AI-assisted security workflows while maintaining the technical depth needed to guide complex design, reliability, and operational decisions.

This opportunity will allow you to grow a high-performing security engineering team, advance secure-by-default product and platform engineering, and strengthen your leadership across complex, multidisciplinary initiatives.

Microsoft Culture Statement

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

• Build, manage, coach, and develop a high-performing team of security engineers by defining clear objectives, enabling success across boundaries, investing in individual growth, scaling the team's capabilities, and managing performance with care and accountability.

• Define and execute the team's product and platform security roadmap, align objectives and key results with company priorities, and deliver measurable improvements in risk reduction, control effectiveness, engineering efficiency, and secure development maturity.

• Own and continuously improve the SSDLC by integrating security requirements, architecture and code reviews, threat modeling, static and dynamic analysis, fuzzing, penetration testing, and continuous end-to-end testing throughout the software lifecycle.

• Design and drive adoption of paved paths and developer guardrails for secure coding, cryptographic hygiene, dependency management, software supply-chain security, code integrity, and secure CI/CD across on-premises and cloud environments.

• Build security tooling, automation, and AI-assisted workflows that improve coverage and technical rigor, surface high-value insights, reduce operational overhead, and prevent recurring classes of vulnerabilities.

• Lead internal penetration-testing efforts and manage engagements with external security-testing partners when specialized expertise or independent validation is needed; ensure findings are prioritized, remediated, and used to improve systemic controls.

• Partner with engineering and product teams to identify and mitigate security risks without creating unnecessary delivery friction, pressure-test designs, guide tradeoffs, and make secure approaches easier to adopt.

• Maintain deep technical understanding of the product and platform landscape, evolving attack techniques, and modern defensive practices, and serve as an escalation point for complex or high-impact security risks.

• Use findings, incidents, and post-incident insights to improve architectures, workflows, standards, and controls, and communicate business impact, technical tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to leaders.

• Establish and report meaningful measures for program health, control effectiveness, service availability, remediation progress, operational efficiency, adoption, and risk reduction, and use evidence to focus the team on the highest-value security work.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response

• OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response

• OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response

• OR equivalent experience.

• 1+ year(s) people management 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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, or anomaly detection

• OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, or anomaly detection

• OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 12+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, or anomaly detection

• OR equivalent experience.

• 3+ years people management and/or informal/indirect team leadership experience.

• Experience defining technical roadmaps, managing deliverables, and driving operational excellence for complex, multi-stakeholder security or infrastructure initiatives.

• Experience conducting code and architecture reviews and guiding tradeoffs across security, correctness, performance, scale, reliability, and operability.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, identity and access management, authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, policy enforcement, or security-critical production systems.

• Knowledge of Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, continuous integration and continuous delivery security, endpoint security, vulnerability management, observability, logging pipelines, or modern security engineering practices.

• Ability to communicate security risks, technical tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical, non-technical, and leadership audiences.

Security Operations Engineering M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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. (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html)