Principal Software Engineer

The Conditional Access team builds the policy engine at the heart of Microsoft Entra and the Zero Trust security model. Every time a user or workload attempts to access a Microsoft or third-party resource, Conditional Access evaluates the full context of that request — user, device, location, application, real-time risk, and more — and makes the critical decision to grant, block, or challenge access. We are the enforcement point that turns "verify explicitly" from a principle into reality for hundreds of thousands of organizations and billions of authentications every day. Operating at extreme scale and with zero tolerance for downtime, our team owns the design, delivery, and live-site health of a mission-critical service that sits in the authentication hot path. We tackle hard problems across distributed systems, low-latency policy evaluation, security, and resilience — where correctness and availability directly protect our customers from real-world attacks. As identity increasingly becomes the security perimeter, and as we converge with Global Secure Access to protect network traffic as well as identity, our work is central to how Microsoft secures the modern enterprise. We're a team of engineers who care deeply about customer trust, operational excellence, and raising the bar for security across the industry. We move fast, own our outcomes end to end, and take pride in defending customers at a scale few teams in the world operate at.

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.

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Principal Software Engineer — Responsibilities Technical leadership & architecture

• Own the technical direction and architecture for one or more critical services, driving designs that are secure, scalable, and reliable at Microsoft scale.

• Lead complex, cross-team system design efforts spanning identity, policy evaluation, and secure access enforcement; make and document high-impact architectural decisions and trade-offs.

• Set and raise engineering standards for code quality, testing, performance, and operational excellence across the team. Delivery & execution

• Break down ambiguous, large-scale problems into actionable technical roadmaps and drive them to delivery across multiple engineers and teams.

• Personally deliver on the hardest, highest-risk parts of the work, and unblock others when execution stalls.

• Drive engineering rigor in security, privacy, compliance, and Zero Trust principles throughout the development lifecycle. Reliability & operational excellence

• Champion live-site health, security posture, and operational readiness; lead incident response and drive systemic fixes for the toughest issues.

• Define SLAs/SLOs and instrument services for observability, resilience, and rapid recovery. Influence & cross-org impact

• Partner with PM, partner engineering teams, and leadership to shape product and platform strategy beyond team boundaries.

• Represent the team in cross-org technical forums, architecture reviews, and standards bodies; align stakeholders around a shared technical vision.

• Drive alignment on shared platforms and reduce duplication across adjacent teams. People & culture

• Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers, raising the technical bar and building the next generation of technical leaders.

• Provide deep, constructive technical review (designs, code, incident postmortems) that elevates the whole team.

• Model an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture and strong customer obsession.

Other

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