Principal Applied AI Engineer

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.

The Generalized Agents team is at the forefront of AI innovation, driving cutting-edge research and development across deep learning, natural language processing, large language models (LLMs/GPT), reinforcement learning (RL), and graph-based models. We specialize in pioneering advanced agentic solutions, including state-of-the-art AI innovations with RL fine-tuning of LLMs, to build intelligent systems that adapt, reason, and act autonomously. Our mission is to anticipate future technological needs and seamlessly integrate transformative AI capabilities into our product ecosystem—delivering solutions that not only meet today’s challenges but also lay the foundation for the next generation of applied AI and data science.

We are looking for an enthusiastic Principal Applied AI Engineer to join our dynamic team, who is passionate about the latest AI advancements, has a high-level dedication to team success, drives and implements high-quality code, and is willing to take on a challenge of collaborating with a team of world-class applied AI researchers. Our goal, to build new methods, tools, and frameworks for demonstrating how AI-powered solutions can help Microsoft Security spearhead a new era of securing and managing digital estate for our customers.

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.

Required/minimum qualifications

• 2+ years of experience with LLMs and open-source GenAI frameworks, such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, or equivalents (e.g., Transformers, AutoGen, DSPy), including agent-based orchestration, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning and evaluation.​ Proficiency in writing production-quality software code in one or more modern programming languages (Python, C#)
• 5+ years experience developing software systems end-to-end, from design to implementation.
• 2+ years experience in shipping at least 2 large scale ML/AI-based services or applications on cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, etc.)

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 Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or preferred qualifications
Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 10+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until August 17, 2025

#MSFTSecurity #MSECAI #AI #AIML #AIEngineer #AppliedResearch #ThreatIntelligence #LLM #ReinforcementLearning #DeepLearning

• Architect, design, and implement training and solution pipelines for complex agentic AI systems, including building tech preview prototypes.
• Integrate RL-fine-tuned LLM based research prototypes into production-level platforms.
• Collaborate and drive common design with senior technical staff of Microsoft Sentinel Graph, Copilot for Security and other Microsoft Security products
• Act as a catalyst in accelerating the team’s transition to an AI-first mindset and development approach.
• Serve as a thought leader in architecting advanced AI systems and agentic AI solutions with RL-fine-tuned LLMs.

Embody our culture and values