Security Software Engineer II

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.

Are you a software engineer interested in Artificial intelligence (AI) and excited about technologies like LLMs and reinforcement learning? Do you want to develop automation that red teams can use to exploit security vulnerabilities in Microsoft's largest AI systems impacting millions of users? We are looking for a Security Software Engineer II to join Microsoft's PyRIT Team (https://github.com/Azure/PyRIT) where you'll create software to emulate real-world attacks against Microsoft's AI products. We are part of the Microsoft AI Red Team, an interdisciplinary group of red teamers, adversarial Machine Learning (ML) researchers and software developers with the mission to identify risks in Microsoft's big bet AI systems.

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

• Design, implement, and support AI-driven adversary emulation tooling 
• Support partner development teams and the open-source community 
• Partner with internal defensive security teams to improve their detection, investigation, and response capabilities 
• Build strong relationships with peers through design and code reviews 
• Analyze emerging attack techniques from red teams, adversarial researchers, and external threat actors, leveraging these insights to develop and refine advanced security tooling.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience applying modern AI/ML techniques (e.g., transformer architectures, fine-tuning, or retrieval-augmented generation) to real-world engineering problems.

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:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
• Ability to write clean, efficient, and maintainable Python code. 
• Experience with the operation of AI infrastructure (networking, Azure, HuggingFace, etc.) 
• Expertise in utilizing LLM library features for fine-tuning and optimizing model outputs.
• Ability to evaluate and refine prompts based on model responses to enhance accuracy and relevance. 
• Experience in identifying security vulnerabilities, software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cyber security, and anomaly detection.

Software Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 per year.

Certain roles may be eligibl