Principal Technical Writer

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to change the world around us, but we shold act ethically along the way. At Microsoft, we are committed to the advancement of AI driven by ethical principles. We are looking for a Principal Technical Writer to join us to educate and empower engineering teams with an understanding of AI Safety to deliver on that promise. Are you passionate about security and technology in society? This may be a great opportunity for you!

Who we are:

We are the Artificial Generative Intelligence Security (AeGIS) team, and we are charged with ensuring justified confidence in the safety of Microsoft’s generative AI products. This encompasses providing an infrastructure for AI safety; coordinating AI incident response; researching the evolving threat landscape; red teaming AI systems; and empowering Microsoft with this knowledge. We partner closely with product engineering teams to mitigate and address the full range of threats that face AI services – from traditional security risks to novel security threats like indirect prompt injection and entirely AI-native threats like the manufacture of NCII or CSAM or the use of AI to run automated scams. We are a mission-driven team intent on delivering trustworthy AI and response processes when it does not live up to those standards.

How we work:

We are always learning- we lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. We build on each other’s ideas, because we are better together. We are motivated every day to empower others to do and achieve more through our technology and innovation. Together we make a difference for all our customers, from end users to Fortune 50 enterprises.

Our team has people from a wide variety of backgrounds, previous work histories, and life experiences, and we are eager to maintain and grow that diversity. Our diversity of backgrounds and experiences enables us to create innovative solutions for our customers. Our culture is collaborative and customer focused.

What we do:

While some aspects of safety can be formalized in software or process, many things require thinking and experience – things like threat modeling, identifying the right places and ways to mitigate risks, and building response strategies. In the world of AI safety, this requires an awareness and understanding of threats and risks far beyond those from traditional security; you don’t just need to worry about an access control failure, you need to worry about the user of your system having an abusive partner who’s spying on them. The Empowering Microsoft team within AeGIS is charged with continually distilling our understanding of AI safety into training, documentation, methodologies and tools that empower the people designing, building, testing, and using systems to do so safely. While the team’s top priority is to train Microsoft’s own teams, we are looking beyond that to provide these resources to the world at large.

How you can help:

We are searching for a person who can transform an understanding of safety best practices into a range of training materials (documents, presentations, etc.) for engineers, product managers, designers, and many other disciplines so that they can integrate those practices effectively into their work. A particular challenge will be that these practices involve thinking in ways people aren’t familiar with (thinking like adversaries, thinking about how systems will fail) and about issues people are unfamiliar or even uncomfortable with (the abusive partner example above is not hypothetical), and we need to light up a few hundred thousand people with a deep understanding of this nonetheless.

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

• Develop a strategy for communicating AI Safety concepts and best practices to a broad range of disciplines
• Creating content across a range of media that explains these ideas in practical, human (or societal) centered way
• Work with a range of teams to understand the issues involved in AI safety and the methodologies used to manage them